Everywhere I go these days, I hear from IT departments how they feel caught between legacy systems and the cloud.
And the truth is that it’s hard to see the future when you’re up to your ears in the past. Yet that’s exactly how a lot of IT people feel as they struggle to maintain legacy systems while moving applications into a cloud-based model. Sometimes it can feel like moving a mountain; other times it’s like whitewater rafting into the unknown. That’s why it’s so important to have a technology roadmap in place for the journey ahead.
The first thing to understand about journeys is that they’re personal. No two businesses will have exactly the same journey, though they may start from similar places. Generally, I see businesses starting either from a base camp of complexity—a system they created with multiple vendors and now spend a good chunk of time updating and maintaining—or simplicity via a basic system that has fewer features because of limited IT resources.
The second thing to understand about journeys is that they’re often not voluntary. In the case of today’s enterprises, technology transformation is no longer about doing something faster than you did before—it’s about doing something you couldn’t do (and may not even have dreamed of doing) before. For example, the cloud journeys we see today are often being driven by business users outside of IT who crave, not more speed, but more innovation and inspiration—and telling them to wait six months while you test and integrate hardware and software isn’t going to cut it.
So what does a good technology roadmap look like? For starters, it should be simple with as many straight lines and shortcuts as possible. We recommend that customers consider a hyperconverged infrastructure for this reason. Hyperconverged solutions reduce opex and capex by consolidating all of your core IT functions—storage, computing, networking—into a single, server-based appliance. This takes the complexity out of hardware and puts the emphasis back on applications, where it belongs. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 80% of IT environments make the shift to hyperconverged over the next five to ten years.
Does that mean the remaining 20% of IT will stay the same? Not at all. With the rise in data creation and consumption, another trend on the horizon is hyperconsolidated data storage, which is where the balance of IT will be in the future. Having a single, scalable appliance that can store a petabyte or more of data and serve it up in near real-time through the “magic” of Flash technology allows enterprises to really get more day-to-day value from their data. With hyperconverged infrastructure and hyperconsolidated data systems, we anticipate enterprise data centers will have fewer moving parts that are bigger and simpler to manage, but modular in design so they can scale quickly and cost effectively.
Not surprisingly, these technologies are also appearing on more vendor roadmaps. Management is much simpler in a hyperconverged/hyperconsolidated world, which means that IT departments can spend more time thinking about what their business should be doing and less time worrying about how they’ll get it done.
In other words, the kind of future that IT departments can actually look forward to.
And speaking of the future, don’t forget to tune in for the next blog in this series, With Hyperconvergence, What You Don’t See Is What You Get. ▪
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