Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Mike Capuano, Chief Marketing Officer, Pluribus Networks

5 Trends to Watch in 2019

2019 is going to be truly exciting as we will see a confluence of various technologies, architectures and vendors coming together to solve a profound new class of edge use cases. As we look at the year ahead, there are five trends in particular that we see picking up steam:

1) Edge compute emerges

Businesses globally are undergoing digital transformation, and every enterprise will need to have a digital strategy to generate new revenue, deliver a better user experience, drive employee productivity and compete. In 2019 edge computing, which places processing power closer to people and things, is going to be transformational and help businesses succeed and thrive in this new landscape. Multiple industries will drive edge computing including utilies, transportation, healthcare, CDNs, road safety, oil and gas and many others. Uses cases will include things like continuous monitoring to identify and proactively respond to dangerous issues, low latency augmented reality for field service applications, and gaming with real-time mass multiplayer experiences. 5G will be a catalyst for edge compute, enabling low latency and high speed connectivity everywhere. These transformational changes are going to influence how enterprises and service providers architect their infrastructure, including preparing for an increase in compute locations and designing a system level approach with increased automation.

2) Not all workloads move to the public cloud

As businesses gear up to become more agile and efficient in the new hyper-connected cloud world, they need to determine the optimal location for hosting workloads. While many workloads will move to the public cloud, others will remain on premise. Some workloads, especially those that are not bursty, are more economical to run on premise. Other drivers for keeping applications on premise include maintaining control, difficulty in refactoring as well as GDPR and data privacy. Supporting this trend is a recent IHS Markit survey from December 2018 "Data Center Compute Strategies and Leadership," that shows 74% of enterprises will increase spending on servers, and 67% will increase spending on networking in their data centers in 2019 as data and insight on data become business drivers in the enterprise.

Some workloads, such as IoT applications, with latency or local compute requirements will be hosted close to connected devices in locations such as co-location facilities, micro data centers and factory floors. As the infrastructure becomes decentralized, it will be increasingly critical to drive system level thinking around orchestrating various elements of the network for the most efficient placement of the workloads.

3) Open networking and SDN fabrics gain ground

As the infrastructure becomes more distributed, service providers and enterprises will adopt an architecture which is open, elastic, multi-tenant, programmable and agile. With a massive number of locations being built and managed, achieving operational simplicity through automation and lower cost through white box economics will be critical. The architecture will need to be open and manageable for supporting Day 0 plug and play options, as well as Day 1 and Day 2 management either through Rest APIs or centralized management. Other attributes of end-to-end security, network slicing, high availability, visibility and analytics are key requirements as the network becomes more distributed and 5G becomes ubiquitous.

4) An ecosystem of vendors will arrive that enable the edge

In order to build this new edge infrastructure, service providers and infrastructure players will take the lessons learnt from cloud providers, building software defined, programmable infrastructure coupled with white box economics.  New players will emerge such as edge co-location facilities and edge orchestrators  who will spin up container infrastructure to support workloads when and where they need to be deployed. Managed service providers will also play a role in the design, install and management of edge infrastructure. There will be many other hardware and software vendors and service providers who will collaborate to create an innovative ecosystem, complementing the value provided at different levels of the infrastructure and application stack. Enterprises and service providers deploying edge infrastructure should be careful not to get locked in by a single vendor who claims to "do it all."

5) AI/ML will take advantage of edge compute to deliver instant value from data

As Clive Humby famously said - "Data is the new oil. It's valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value." Given that data processing can be done closer to users via edge compute, technologies like AI/ML will be able to deliver instant value, empowering businesses with valuable insights and pattern discovery as well as predictive analytics to improve uptime, performance, quality and safety.

##

About the Author

 

Mike Capuano is Chief Marketing Officer of Pluribus Networks. He has over 20 years of marketing, product management and business development experience in the networking industry. Prior to joining Pluribus, Mike was VP of Global Marketing at Infinera, where he built a world class marketing team and helped drive revenue from $400M to over $800M. Prior to Infinera, Mike led product marketing across Cisco's $6B service provider routing, switching and optical portfolio and launched iconic products such as the CRS and ASR routers. He has also held senior positions at Juniper Networks, Pacific Broadband and Motorola.

The Pluribus Networks approach to next-generation data center architectures delivers an open, virtualized and highly programmable network fabric that ensures simplicity, agility, and resiliency with simplified management and white-box economics. Enabling freedom from legacy network constraints, the Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric is powered by the Netvisor ONE OS and supports a wide range of Open Networking switches including devices from Dell EMC, D-Link Systems, Edgecore, and the Pluribus Freedom series network switches. These next-generation data center switches are purpose-built for software-defined and virtualized data centers of all sizes and deliver a cost-effective, high-performance, and scalable network foundation for infrastructure and application modernization. The combination of Open Networking hardware and the Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric delivers a capability set that empowers any size organization to do more with their next-generation data center architectures while eliminating complexities, reducing risk, and speeding the time to value.