IT infrastructure predictions for 2016
Chuck Hollis
May you live in interesting times is a popular apocryphal curse attributed to the Chinese. If you work in the IT industry, these are certainly interesting times.
The IT infrastructure industry continues to consolidate and restructure, putting familiar names in play. Cloud has emerged as more than just a convenient consumption option; it has become the new blueprint for IT operations.
In the spirit of the New Year, wed like to share a handful of IT infrastructure predictions we think will unfold in 2016. The fun part will be to come back in a years time and score the accuracy of our crystal ball.
The New RFP: Cloud Plus Data Center
Weve certainly seen cloud requests for proposal, and weve seen plenty of data center RFPsbut rarely the two together. In 2016 well see the first wave of integrated RFPs, where the two are intended to work together, not independently.
Heres why: Complexity is the enemy of efficiency, and IT pros realize that a big problem with public clouds is that theyre fundamentally different from how enterprise IT runs. Typically, the feature set is different; management is different, and so on.
Those differences create complexity, limiting the appeal of using public cloud services and on-premises IT together.
Expect to see a new breed of cloud RFPs, integrating on-premises and data center, built on a single architecture and supported by a single vendor.
Build-Your-Own Infrastructure Declines
Many IT architects prefer independent technologies at each layer of the stack (storage, servers, hypervisors, and so on), with few dependencies between the layers. In an effort to avoid vendor lock-in, they saddle themselves with expensive and difficult integration and support obligations.
While this practice has been moving toward disfavor for a few years, its really accelerating for the infrastructure that sits behind critical databases and applications. The stakes (performance, availability, data protection, security, economics, operations, and so on) are just too high to trust the do-it-yourself approach.
In 2016 expect to see more IT
shops focused on using critical IT infrastructure and not attempting to hand-craft it.
Specialized Infrastructure Gains Favor
What makes enterprise IT different from other forms is that it typically must support a broad range of wildly
different workloads. However, that business reality is opposed by the wishes of the infrastructure team, which would like to have a one-size-fits-all
architecture. By building to the averages, the usual result is that the extremes are not optimized. The IT architecture either falls short for critical workloads that are important to the business, or it isnt as ruthlessly cost-efficient at the other end.
In 2016 well see many more IT shops begin to realize that one-size-fits-all doesnt. Theyll segment their workloads into multiple buckets and start thinking about how to optimize for each versus all.
IT Builds Its Information Fortress
Its war out there, and the good guys arent winning. Many enterprises have their sensitive information scattered across hundreds (or thousands!) of databases, making them much harder to protect.
The surface attack area needs to be reduced through aggressive consolidation, encryption needs to be universally deployed, and the infrastructure
itself needs to be industrially hardened through rigorous process: patching, credential management, auditing, etc.
In 2016 more IT professionals will realize that databases are the last, best line of defense in halting information breaches, and theyll get busy re-architecting and building their information fortresses.
Surprise! Tape Becomes Cool Again
Disk has clearly supplanted tape as the medium of choice for rapid data backup and recovery, but this story isnt over yet. Consider vast cost-reduced data archives, and youll appreciate the growing appeal of tape.
Yes, were all creating zettabytes of information, but not all of it needs to be immediately accessible, does it? Tape is now enjoying a quiet renaissance in situations where long-term preservation and cost efficiency at scale really matter. Like it does for many of the popular cloud providers.
In 2016 expect modern tape technology to start supplanting disk for cloud-scale archival data repositories.
Expect Even More Turmoil in the IT Infrastructure Industry
This year we saw Hewlett-Packard split in half, Dell acquire EMC, and IBM disinvest more parts of its IT infrastructure business.
The reason? The twin disruptions of commoditization and cloud.
Commoditization is making differentiation more difficult for many IT vendors, forcing them to compete through size and scale. And without a compelling (and compatible) cloud option for their enterprise customers, those vendors are simply less appealing than those that can offer it.
Next year we will see even more dramatic shifts in the vendor landscape. The powerful forces at work have just begun to transform our familiar industry into something very different indeed. Well see more consolidation, more pruning of product lines, and even more cloud offerings enter and leave the market.
We cant be sure what 2016 will bring, but its guaranteed to be interesting.
The writer is a senior vice president of converged infrastructure at Oracle
