ESG Blogs

2018 was a breakout year for AI and machine learning. Practically every vendor has or is working on an AI story, and businesses are looking for the easiest ways to embrace and benefit from the technology as soon as possible to maintain their competitive edge. There have been some amazing and eye-opening stories throughout the year that hint at the future: Google Duplex and an AI assistant making appointments at local businesses over the phone, NVIDIA AI creating faces of fake humans, AI beating doctors in diagnosing cancer, and facial recognition at concerts to catch stalkers. The good news is that we are nowhere near Skynet, and we won’t be there for quite some time, if ever. But the line between hype and reality is starting to blur and 2019 will be a year of applicability, shifting from hype to real-world usage.

The hyperconverged market continued its meteoric rise and exploded in 2018. Virtually every vendor saw growth in their product offerings. The technology is being embraced across all verticals and use cases, and for customers, its yielding real business benefits. With the expectation that market adoption will continue to rise in 2019, here are a few things I’m expecting to impact the HCI market.

This is exciting stuff, so let’s jump right in.

First on the financials, which are sure to dominate the headlines. It’s a stock merger with Cloudera stockholders getting 60% stake in the new entity and Hortonworks stockholders obviously getting the other 40%. The combined organization is initially being valued at $5.2 billion, with Hortonworks having found positive cash flow by offering robust support services across the data analytics pipeline and Cloudera too relying on incorporating support within its subscription-based pricing model.

With VMworld approaching next week, I thought I would share what I’m expecting to hear and what I’m looking forward to on the HCI front in Vegas.

I’m excited about the shift and spotlight HCI has garnered over the last year. It’s gained traction, it’s gotten more competitive, and it’s being recognized as much more than an x86 server with compute and storage. It’s about incorporating networking, ensuring workload mobility, properly managing distributed clusters, data lifecycle management, and embracing hybrid cloud. And while all of these aspects will be key areas of focus at the show as whole, let’s focus on HCI.

With the growth of data and the focus on becoming more data-driven, many organizations have turned to Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark as their big data and analytics framework to store and process their data. While the solutions are quite powerful, to effectively manage a constantly evolving infrastructure that must continue to meet the demands of a modern business, it can quickly become a logistical and administrative nightmare. With the understanding that organizations have plans to adopt cloud technology and one of the top use cases for existing IaaS and PaaS users is for data analytics, the idea of leveraging an Hadoop- and Spark-based managed service in the cloud is quite appealing.

Going into Google NEXT, I expected announcements across the entire cloud business. Between their recent (positive) financials, customer traction and (more importantly) growth, and a rapidly expanding list of offerings and managed services, I expected announcements to focus on what I view as their areas of differentiation: foundational built-in security by design, commitment to open-source technologies in their own and across clouds, core AI and ML solutions and services that are embedded/ integrated across GCP services, and easy-to-use cloud-native collaboration products in GSuite. While I’ll let my colleagues share their thoughts on security, mobility/devices, and dev/ops, I’ll be focusing my recap on analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) are anchored in virtualization—virtual storage, virtual compute, and virtual networking. And we know the big names in the hypervisor space: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Recent ESG research asked organizations what they consider to be their primary hypervisor deployed in production. Fifty five percent of organizations selected VMware vSphere, while another 36% primarily leverage Microsoft Hyper-V.

Organizations are being told to digitally transform, to become more agile, and to respond to the business faster in order to survive in a highly competitive market. And one way organizations are digitally transforming is by modernizing their infrastructures, which means shifting from a traditional 3-tier architecture to a solution that integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. Such a solution must deliver a more cloud-like experience on-premises, making the eventual transition to the cloud easier or better yet, enabling organizations to confidently move cloud-native applications from the public cloud back to an on-premises private cloud. Both converged infrastructure (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) fit the bill, but what is driving organizations to pick one over the other?

Having taken a few days break from the color orange, I’m ready to share my thoughts on Pure Accelerate. The show started with Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo talking about stools, with the three legs of a stool representing the core components of the data center: compute, networking, and storage. We were left with a new Pure vision anchored in storage, but focused on more than storage: a data-centric architecture that addresses the simplicity, agility, and performance requirements of the modern business. 

Well Nutanix .NEXT has come and gone and as I continue to digest all the announcements from Nutanix, one word comes to mind that expresses my thoughts: ambition. Why? They don't want to just be the HCI infrastructure in a data center. They want to be the data center. They want to enable hybrid cloud. They want to enable multi-cloud. They want to simplify the smart edge and enable IoT. And they want all the complexity associated with all of it to be invisible.