Dynamic market shifts set the stage for a new data centre paradigm

The infrastructure industry is seeing dramatic upheaval as major forces are driving change. Against a backdrop of continued staff limitations, increasing service level demands, and workload shift to cloud-like models, comes increasing demand for lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), easier deployment and management, and greater flexibility in the data centre. George Symons, Gridstore CEO, makes several predictions how all this will impact 2016.

The market for hyper-converged solutions will grow faster than any other server or storage category. The demand for easier to deploy and manage as well as a lower TCO is driving significant growth in the hyper-converged segment. This is reflected in both infrastructure refreshes and upgrades as well as for specific workloads. The loser here is both standalone servers and legacy SANs, against which the new hyper-converged infrastructure is taking market share.

More Software Defined vendors will deliver their software as an appliance on hardware. Software-defined as a category has developed substantially in the past year, with more customers understanding what it is and can deliver. However, mid-market users do not want to be their own integrators by getting software from one vendor and the hardware elsewhere. They want an engineered, supported, and easy-to-implement solution. Alternately, those that are very price-sensitive or large organisations with lots of resources are more willing to be their own internal integrators and therefore are interested in software only.

Erasure encoding is increasingly adopted by vendors, however still few of them will use it for primary data unless they can solve the performance challenge. Larger disk drive density, fast recovery, and object technology are all the drivers for the increase usage of erasure encoding to protect data. However, performance has been an issue for primary storage which is why you see fewer vendors supporting it in those solutions, only those that do have solved this challenge.

The hype cycle for containers will reach its maximum ahead of market growth. We are going to hear more about containers this year than we have yet. We still will not see significant implementation growth in 2016, much of that will come in 2017. With that said, containers are going to be a game changer and will have a significant impact on infrastructure and application development.

This really is the year for VDI. VDI has been on the radar for many years, and many organisations have led the way to early adoption, helping to work out the challenges. Finally we are seeing broad customer interest fuelling lots of POCs and small, 100 to 500 seat deployments. In 2016 this will expand dramatically as customers move from those initial starts to broad adoption.

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