The near future of cloud technology and virtualization
Our world is arranged in such a way that it is impossible to predict the future. It can only be predicted, however, and this is quite a difficult task, especially when it comes to the field of high technologies. There is no need to go far for an example: only a couple of years ago, few could have imagined that container technology would become a new trend, and today they have become widespread. So it is difficult to predict, it is always interesting to read about it.
According to the latest IDC forecasts , the number of data centers around the world will reach 8.6 million by 2017, after which the growth will decrease. And over the next five years, according to Richard Villars, vice president of Datacenter & Cloud, "most organizations will no longer support their own infrastructure."
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In the last article from ZDNet, devoted to the comparison of clouds and the topic of collocation, it says that the cloud has already captured part of the market from rental units. And although the number of data centers will decrease, the remaining ones are likely to start growing due to the increasing number of migrations to the cloud. IDC assumes that companies will consider cloud options primarily for their new services, using local infrastructure or colocation for existing IT systems.
IT specialists - builders by nature. Working on a new system allows you to stretch your brains, but developing from scratch all components seriously slows down the creation of a project and hinders business development. “I think it's time to change the approach. We are valuable not by the ability to build a “candy” out of the garbage, but by the ability to solve problems quickly and accurately, ”said Chris Wolf, technical director of VMware.
The opinion of Chris every year is shared by an increasing number of organizations that are starting to converge to convergence. The fact is that it is inappropriate to spend time on inventing a bicycle, when you can focus your efforts on something useful.
Convergence is a popular trend in IT, involving the sharing of familiar and new technologies. For example, instead of building two separate LANs and SANs, you can deploy a single Ethernet network and already split traffic to the LAN and SAN.
A bright future, as Andi Mann (Andrews Mann), vice president of CA Technologies, is sure , is also waiting for virtualization technologies: “Virtualization will come in businesses of all sizes, including consumer scenarios.”
Virtual devices will contribute to a greater penetration of the BYOD idea (Bring Your Own Device), and container virtualization technologies under the patronage of large market players will certainly go to the masses. BYOD is a variant of the organization of the workplace of the employee, in which he uses his own devices to work with corporate resources. For example, it can come with a home laptop, connect to the corporate Wi-Fi and start working with e-mail. The idea has long gained popularity abroad due to the desire of people to work with familiar devices.
Against the background of trends in the choice of a virtual platform for a specific application, the question of managing several hypervisors will be acute. If vSphere is better suited for one application and Hyper-V is better for another, then it is obvious that both of them will appear on the corporate network. Thus, we can conclude that virtualization management tools will be multivendor.
Any management tool will need to support several different hypervisors. The ideas of convergence are already widely used in managing virtual and cloud environments, and this connection will only grow stronger. Now it is important to choose such management tools that already support different virtualization systems with the same set of features.
Another trend is software-defined (Software-defined, SD) systems that will become familiar to most disk systems. The history of software-defined systems will somewhat resemble a cloud situation. The advantage of the original idea is obvious - this is the possibility of reprogramming the unified infrastructure for the changing needs of the company, which looks quite tempting for the user. Despite this, there will be solutions on the market that are positioned as SD simply because they are packaged in the Virtual Appliance format (virtual machine ready for work).
One way or another, but data centers will become more flexible and plastic in terms of configuration, regardless of the accuracy of definitions. But what about the IaaS market in Russia?
The market of IaaS in our country is becoming more mature, and this is confirmed by the understanding of the subject by the customer. The number of customers who are aware of the importance of the concept of IaaS and the clouds in general is gradually increasing. The terminology becomes close and understandable not only to IT professionals, but also to managers, who often start asking questions to IT departments, trying to understand whether it is possible to somehow improve business processes with the help of clouds.
As for the development of the market, then, firstly, all new players come to it, generating competition. The more such players, the better. Secondly, devaluation promotes development, which is a very relevant factor for Russia.
Because of this, many companies can not solve the problem on their own - in their budget is not enough for this money. Therefore, in order to achieve the goals set, one has to look for new solutions. Do not forget about the federal law on personal data. Many companies, especially Western ones, whose infrastructure was located abroad, gradually began to transfer data to Russia, turning to local IaaS providers.
Also changed the approach to the use of technology. Since the demand for cloud services has become significantly higher, situations have arisen where an organization uses the sites of several IaaS providers, which gives it a sense of confidence and increases the reliability and availability of infrastructure. Moreover, if earlier the client transferred only a part of his services to the cloud, now he trusts the provider to implement full-fledged projects.
Another significant moment is that with the growth of demand for services in the market, a certain specialization has appeared. “Previously, we had to practically go in the wake of a single client, adjust to his needs,” says Dmitry Gachko, CEO of IT-GRAD. - And all because the market was empty, and without “fitting” the services for the tasks of a single client could not be avoided. ” Now the situation has changed and the direction of movement of the customer is set by the IaaS provider.
Another important point worth noting is the role of local service providers against the background of creating large international cloud platforms such as Amazon, Microsoft and VMware.
Many people get scared when someone large comes to the market because they think that he will crush everything and everyone, but it’s obvious that every giant has certain limitations, especially in terms of the technologies used. An important difference between a typical local cloud provider and a major international provider is that it is free to choose the technologies used. After all, to meet the expectations of the customer and provide what he wants, it suffices to choose the necessary solution. Thus, the local provider always remains more flexible than any other global provider.
“In addition, we all understand that the market is large enough and there is enough space for everyone. - notes Dmitry. “This is a bit like the situation with data centers where mature players do not climb into the cloud business, because they understand that this is not their direction.” Something similar happens to cloud providers.
And finally, I would like to mention one of the most popular trends of the coming years - the Internet of Things. According to IDC research , by 2019 more than two thirds of consumers plan to purchase a smart device with Internet connection at home. Moreover, half of them intend to purchase wearable gadgets.
Such a pace of penetration of wearable technology will cause serious problems for IT departments in the next two years, as customers will expect from corporate services continuous availability, which will increase the burden on IT departments. If the hourly cost of service downtime sometimes reaches six-digit numbers, then with the arrival of IoT financial losses will become even more significant.
We can say that clouds are waiting for a turning point, since many of the emerging technologies are already being implemented everywhere - over the next few years, approaches to the creation and operation of data centers will change beyond recognition. Like it or not, only time will tell.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/280864/
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