2018 Predictions by CTO of Virtual Instruments

Here are 2018 predictions from John Gentry, CTO, Virtual Instruments.
 
Five emerging trends in 2018
 
A few years ago, you might have been convinced that cloud storage would be the holy grail of storage, capable of scaling up or down as needed and doing away with data centre complexity. In reality, the rise of the cloud, hyperconvergence and software defined has introduced further complexity into the data centre. In 2018, we are likely to see five emerging trends that are hinged upon reducing complexity and improving application and infrastructure performance.
 
1 A shift away from the ‘hybrid data centre’ to the ‘hybrid application’
In the recent past, IT managers determined where to store data and run applications according to their specific attributes; on dedicated hardware, in a private cloud, or in the public cloud, for example. But this does not make sense. There are multiple components to a single application which could be running in different data centres or on different infrastructure types.
 
Conversely to the old way of adopting a blind ‘cloud first’ strategy, we will start to see a more intelligent and considered approach, whereby the selection of the right technology for the application type or profile becomes a more deliberate process.
 
2 Cloud repatriation
According to ESG, nearly two thirds of enterprises have repatriated some applications from the cloud back to on-premise and 90% of enterprise storage managers will establish storage performance and availability SLAs. This is a significant trend for the coming year and it indicates that not all workloads are suitable for the public cloud. A hybrid application has components that live in the cloud, but also those that should be on premise, and this is being recognised by IT teams.
 
The repatriation process will inevitably shake up the vendor ecosystem too. While Amazon is currently the leader, other players such as Google, Virtustream and IBM SoftLayer are likely to make significant gains as companies reconsider their cloud strategies.
 
3 SLAs
In 2018, we are likely to see the emphasis shift beyond simple availability to performance user experience, underpinned by SLAs. In other words, IT managers will be less worried about the type of infrastructure their applications are running on. Instead, they will be more concerned with the SLAs that are being delivered for their application workloads.
 
The need for more detailed assurance around performance is going to drive IT organisations to provide application-specific SLAs in 2018.
 
4 The rise of application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM)
IPM will become more critical to businesses as they look to gain better visibility, as applications reside across layers of compute, network and storage environments. Workload behaviour analysis will be crucial for IT managers as they attempt to align the most appropriate technologies with their application requirements.
 
In 2018, we will see more collaboration between teams across various functions. This will happen because silos between the business and within IT are being broken down as IT becomes ever more crucial to enterprises’ overall performance.
 
5 Closing the debate on open source
Over the coming year, the fate of open source ecosystems will be determined. We have seen ebbs and flows of technologies such as OpenStack, but they have not been widely adopted into enterprise IT for core business applications.
 
In 2018, we will see whether or not open source becomes a production-level technology or whether its use continues to be restricted to testing and development environments.
 
From a vendor’s perspective, competition from smaller players will show no sign of abating and the trend towards increased collaboration and partnerships will continue.
 
At the heart of these emerging trends in 2018 is the importance of aligning applications with the right technologies and approaches. While the cloud is here to stay, IT managers have abandoned a cloud-only policy and are instead adopting a more intelligent approach by collaborating internally and externally to ensure they have the right systems and technology integration in order to succeed.