The software-defined data center (SDDC) has moved from architectural concept to business reality in a surprisingly short amount of time.
The rapid adoption of the SDDC has been driven in large part by the convergence and, now, hyperconvergence of IT infrastructure. As hardware disappears, software and particularly applications, have become the dominant focus of IT departments, as they should be.
In a sense, what we’re witnessing today is a kind of Cretaceous Period in IT where the data center dinosaurs of the past are disappearing and smaller, more agile devices are taking their place. Within the next five to ten years, many of the data center features we’ve come to know will become extinct as the SDDC evolution continues. So what are these candidates for extinction? Here are five things that I believe hyperconvergence will drive out of the data center and into the IT museum:
Storage Area Networks (SANs)
This is arguably the most transformative benefit of a hyperconverged infrastructure. Hyperconverged servers can accommodate both traditional (i.e., spinning disk) and flash storage. This capability enables IT departments to deploy a virtual SAN that can provide simplicity of management, faster access and analytics, lower cost, and more agility. This means the traditional SAN, which has long taken a significant chunk out of IT capex and opex, will disappear from the data center—and with it, an entire ecosystem of tape drives and storage arrays.
Dedicated Hardware
When virtualization arrived, it essentially turned hardware into a commodity, but even so there were vendors making the case that mission-critical applications required dedicated hardware to maintain high availability and high performance. These days, most IT vendors concede that software-defined networking (SDN) enables enterprises to meet those same mission-critical demands using a mix of different hardware resources. As a result, the days of the dedicated Windows Server or ERP platform are dwindling.
The Storage/Network Specialist
While I’m not suggesting that storage and networking skills will no longer be valuable, what is disappearing is the siloed approach to IT that separated storage and networking into different teams. As hyperconverged infrastructure reduces the need to manage separate storage and networking devices, IT teams will likely re-align along strategic rather than operational objectives.
Personal Computers with Personal Data
Hyperconvergence is driving an increase in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments because of its virtual storage capabilities. The notion of an IT person configuring and loading apps on a desktop is fast becoming a thing of the past and, in the future, thin clients will be the norm in enterprises—if tablets don’t replace them altogether. More importantly, the idea of carrying personal data on a device will be outdated as information moves to the data center or, in many cases, the cloud.
The 3- to 5-Year Refresh Cycle
IT departments traditionally replaced their hardware every three to five years to take advantage of advancements in processing power, storage, and other technologies such as faster serial ports. With hyperconverged infrastructure, that timetable becomes both accelerated and, in a larger sense, irrelevant because it’s no longer a disruptive rip-and-replace process. Instead, new servers can be deployed quickly in the virtual environment alongside older servers to increase storage capacity, enhance performance, accommodate more users, etc.
One additional point to note is that hyperconverged infrastructure will almost certainly transform the services landscape. Enterprises will increasingly benefit from partners that can deliver end-to-end services, provide applications expertise, and manage an infrastructure that extends across legacy architectures and into multiple cloud environments. It’s a transformation that we embraced long ago at Rolta AdvizeX, and one that benefits our customers now and into the future.
Don’t forget to check out the final blog in my hyperconverged/hyperconsolidated series, All Flash, All the Time? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds. ▪
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