ESG Blogs

What does it mean to have a software-defined architecture (SDA)? Most folks seem to think it will be important in the future, but there's very little agreement on what it means and how it's useful.

For example, in a recent ESG Research Report, we tried to understand how people define software-defined networks, which are just one aspect of a software-defined architecture. We had a wide range of responses, ranging from automation and NFV to control/data plane separation. Those who are trying to be precise with an early definition of SDN may sound rather academic, but those who wave their hands and apply "SDN" to almost anything modern in networking end up sounding like carnival barkers.

Hyper-converged infrastructure vendors beware. Here at EMC World 2015, Guy Churchward, President of EMC’s Core Technologies Division, just announced that Scale-IO, one of EMC’s software-defined data center (SDDC) storage technologies, has been transformed into a pre-integrated, rack-ready, scale-out hyper-converged offering that is now delivered and supported by VCE. Dubbed “VXRACK,” this offering will sit between VCE’s VBLOCK offering and VSPEX Blue (EMC’s version of VMware’s SDN solution), to affordably power Tier-2 data center workloads across private and hybrid cloud environments.

IT infrastructure is constantly riding the often tumultuous waves of consolidation and separation. A typical example would be the eras of mainframe, open systems, and PC computing. No surprise there. For the past three to five years, server virtualization has been a catalyst for data center consolidation, (even though for the most part, IT has mapped server virtualization initiatives to existing IT infrastructure choices, or, dare I say, legacy infrastructure). Regardless, as a result of the success and comfort level of virtualization in the data center and the simplicity of cloud solutions, IT infrastructure is rapidly evolving. Vendors are betting on a shift in thinking among customers where enterprises will no longer want to “accessorize” their existing systems, and will see the light when it comes to converged solutions. That said, be on the lookout for these highlights in 2015:

I recently had the opportunity to attend DellWorld 2014 in my hometown of Austin, Texas. One year after going private, Dell seems, at least to this outside observer, to be filled with excitement and optimism for the future. The positive atmosphere comes as a welcome change from what seems to be a sea of turmoil encompassing the remaining server-storage players in the IT market these days. HP recently announced plans to split the company into two, separating the consumer and enterprise pieces. This news comes in the wake of IBM selling its X-series server business to Lenovo. The list of end-to-end IT providers is rapidly shrinking.

This will be my 9^th year in a row attending VMworld! The event always proves to be a great display of end-user passion that is driving towards new innovation and IT vendors displaying their latest products, solutions, and services. I recently asked the ESG team attending the event if there was anything they planned to track closely or questions that they hoped to get the answers to and here is what they shared:

Hello there! If you haven’t heard, I’m the newest analyst at ESG focusing specifically on cloud, IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS), and the software-defined data center (SDDC). My bio’s listed on the site or you can find me on Linkedin as well so I won’t bore you with those same details.

Instead I’d like to share some other thoughts about where I’d like to take the blog and why I named it the way I did. So first, the name – I think the theme that is starting to really permeate the cloud world finally is enterprise. By enterprise I mean companies with 100-1000 employees or so and their adoption (rate, barriers, challenges, etc.) of cloud computing. In terms of where I’d like to take the blog – well, that one is easy. Wherever I want! Seriously, I just want to explore many of the topics that are being talked about by the customers.