It’s no wonder why this could be perceived as being a risky business, in contrast to the strategy adopted in previous proprietary dominated worlds of Mainframe and Server/Client computing. However with the early adopters of open, extensible technologies now being the biggest fish in the pond and not the smallest first it is becoming quite clear that this architectural strategy is going to continue to dominate and be a defacto strategy to adopt for any new breed player in the world of consumer IT today, and then to likely merge into enterprise strategy.

Comparing the older strategies to the new generation and you couldn’t be far enough apart between what technologies have been used. In the past proprietary technologies have been used to ensure that they have;

• Assurance with the external vendor support when things go well…tits up
• A throat to choke on the end of a phone line when things again go wrong with the risk being applied to the vendor
• Product integration and support within an ecosystem which is capable of partial compatibility with other toolsets and services

To add to this, the previous adoption of proprietary technology, has also made building a support capability to manage and grow that Infrastructure much easier with the educational programs allowing both old and new dogs to be taught tricks.. but again at a cost.

Granted, the difference here is that the likes of Google whom are adopting new strategies have a completely different business model and risk factor in certain areas of business operation but the majority adopting new breed strategy still serve enterprises or indirectly serve enterprise customers. So in my limited wisdom here some thoughts on this new generation of Architectural strategy and where it will go (or not);

How long will it last?

Personally I think this type of strategy is likely to never stall as the momentum grows and the new generations “growing up” in a cloud world are all oblivious to the past strategies, as lets face it the Client/Server world of computing is never going to the inheiritance that the Mainframe has been.

What dependencies are there?

A big one is the community that keeps it ticking and innovative, and I’m also sure this is never going to be an issue for as long as Proprietary technologies are around and people want freedom of openness. To add the likes of Facebook and Google are even building a community themselves that will be respected and continual, for both the organisations own business and the benefit of the open community.

Where does this leave proprietary tech vendors?

In a vulnerable position I think, for years organisations have shelled massive volumes of investment into technology solutions with very little revolutionary development in product sets. We’ve of course seen new technologies arise (at a cost) but they are still lumbered with the original technology that is depreciating meaning less competitive edge and less ability to manoeuvre.

Will it fail?

As i’ve said, we will see yet more emergence of the types of strategy google are adopting and the failure is going to be in the hands of the adopter not the hands of a vendors R&D program. Openness will provide more choice on what is and what isn’t adopted and more importantly at a cheaper cost. If this cost saving against risk is accepted by the key stakeholders then I can’t see it failing.

Do I need to change?

Well I think you and I will need to change the way we approach architecture.  I am and I expect you are still caught in an enterprise world of Client/Server legacy but I see this legacy dissolving in the 3-5 year time frame with more emphasis on knowing how to utilise the inner workings of an open platform and not just know how to read a vendors Readme or PDF in order to architect the solution.

So onto the next year in 2012, for me this is a year of change from the very off. In January 2012 I start a at a new company in there Architecture team. This was a tough decision to make, but it was time to move on to pastures new I felt, I have the crave for new challenges and hurdles to jump, and lastly if I want to reach my eventual goals and aspirations I need to broaden my experience in a different industry and diversify.

As for the industry outlook in 2012, here are some small potential predictions and scenarios that may arise in a few areas of datacentre related infrastructure and technologies;

Infrastructure technologies

When it comes to Storage we’ve got a hard disk crisis, hard disk prices have increased by 10-15% due to natural disasters in the far east, and with the increase in cost most likely being fronted by the customer, this may mean the following scenarios arise;

• Price premium of new disks may mean it is actually more cost effective utilising tiered storage archiving technologies. This quest means the the old school on-premise archiving and optimisation toolsets in the marketplace will get reprieve for another year in what is seen as a dying marketplace,
• Price increases due to disk cost increase will have a knock on of a slowdown on new array procurement. (Or maybe pigs might fly and the markup on implementation and design of arrays may be reduced to factor in the increased pricing of disk),
• Dependent on chosen vendor, the “Big data” strategy in organisations will slowdown and be potentially put on hold,

Lots to look out for in the area of Virtualisation, we will see more push from the alternative Hypervisor vendors arise, this may only be exploratory for larger committed Vmware shops but 2012 will mark the beginning of new horizons at least,

• Microsoft finally get a bigger foot in the door over VMware, it is only a matter of time before cost becomes the biggest driver for change to alternative “Just enough” hypervisors,
• Adoption of alternative hypervisors such as KVM may well become more realistic due to 2011 price increases from VMware,
• VMware finally release a mobile hypervisor platform, whether this will be any good only time can tell, but i’d say in 2012 this will arise,

Onto the desktop that has apparently been dead for the last period of 2012, well will it be in 2012? I doubt it very much but expect to see some of the following;

• A Marketing/PR ambush over the course of the year when Microsoft release early versions ofWindows 8. It will certainly stir the pot that was filled in 2011 thats for sure with the likes of Apple and google pushing for market share.
• As with any Microsoft implementation or upgrade, Windows shops wake up from the hangover of Windows 7 implementations wondering “why did I do that” when Windows 8 is about. W8 has a bit more too it, certainly with the next gen Metro apps, was all that investment in Windows 7 upgrades really worth it?

Cloud

In the area of IaaS we will certainly see more and more uptake of cloud based service delivery in organisations, this will be driven more by board level mandates to save cost (as per usual), and will also be driven by the desire to implement the same levels of service that public cloud offerings are already providing. This will mean;

• More feasibility studies on the use of open source IaaS alternatives such as Joyent, Opennebula and Openstack,
• Self service increases in adoption with more and more organisations wanting IT to be run as a business.

And on a lighter note

• Cloud will fail (again),
• A Storagebeers might actually happen in full force,
• There will be a surplus of Thin clients, monitors, printers and dodgy low end servers available for purchase from the London 2012 olympic committee,

That’s all folks

Discussing his new film which is in full 3D, he discussed the use of 3D and what fascinated him about the technology, examples were made to childhood in an era of Black and White screenplay he saw a moving image that appeared as 3D and create this in a screen play. It gripped him so much he wanted to change the way films were made and so at nearly 70 he has created in a new breed generation of 3D film, a 3D film likely to be a box office hit. Lastly when discussing emergence of 3D he said that history has shown that the trends of adding Colour to films was what viewers demanded and that it would be the norm in years to come, so based on this the industry changed and adapted.

This got me thinking about me and my future (selfishly), I like most and people like yourselves who read my blog should realise in the IT Industry we work in an ever evolving world of technology that in order to benefit and provide value to your organisation requires vision, persistence and embrace to change. If you fail to embrace new change and trends and you are not prepared, it is safe to say you may well be limiting yourself a successful future and more importantly you may limit potential benefits gained by your business through lack of embrace to change..

Remember, there is a new generation of computing arriving in the shape and form of cloud computing. Forget the marketing campaigns on cloud, forget the fancy toolsets used to provide or run a cloud, this is a generation of computing that as with film did when moving from Black and White production to Colour will be used by a generation who really don’t care about whats running underneath or in fact where it is located. What they will however care if it’s a service which doesn’t meet the same criteria and de-facto standard as competition.

So to quickly summarise embrace the change and move forward, it will be the best thing you can do to enable you to have the vision on the trend that may well ever replace cloud computing in many years to come.

Consumer cloud wars have officially begun, and with the Windows 8 release, the middle aged balding guy (sorry if your bald) has now gone out and finally bought a new mid life crisis Harley Davidson. According to the Redmond posee, Windows 8 apparently is “Windows re imagined” and when having a sneak peak myself I instantly see there is definately no lack of focus on end user experience.

Microsoft were beginning to lag with Windows, and this includes more recent releases of Windows 7. To me Windows 7 has been nothing more than Churna-gramming, with at best minimal side benefits to deploying it across an organisation. W7 was Microsoft caught between a rock and a hard place, it certainly was designed I imagine at least Two years before competition and Cloud Computing was beginning to grow in adoption, but with Windows 8, my initial impression from what I have been exposed too from the cheesy marketing pitches and product demos from MS Build 2011 are leading me to believe that this Windows release could well be the entrance for Windows into both developer and consumer cloud wars.

So why is this now the case with Windows 8? Most of what I have seen and read about the Windows 8 buzz are geek marketing pitches aimed at devops, with this being to be honest only the attempt to lay kernels for the next 12 Months. However from the demonstrations of basic UI and also based on the complete rewrite of application framework, I am beginning to think Microsoft has finally started to take note about the design rules needed to architect a cloud experience, and more importantly from an R&D perspective I think they are slowly realising there are now some harsh rules about design and architecture principles to support the modern day consumer of your product. So although you may have heard some of the below factors in many iterations before, across many other news and websites, I will iterate them in my own commentary;

Designing for a tablet and not a PC

Even though anyone with an Ipad may think the Tablet and touch devices are brand new form factor, it isn’t, they have been around in various incarnations for many years. However the difference then was that were designed in a a Frankenstein affair with the end user experience being dictated by functionality within a a legacy OS that was designed for use with a keyboard and mouse. Tablets of today such as the ever popular Ipad have had the end user experience dictated through the end user experience i.e. Touch, App store, instant on etc. Add into this fold the popularity of Android and the even larger device coverage and I believe Microsoft have realised that they have to up there game and say “They were a PC” and are now “Also a tablet” and provide to end users a tablet experience and not a PC one.

Cloud user presence

It is probably fair to say that in this arena Microsoft has taken a gigantic leap of faith with the all new Windows metro interface. Metro has the capability to project Microsoft away from the tarnished legacy of the point and click user experience from which we have all known (and hated) for the last ten years in the PC/Server architecture era to next gen Cloud. From what I have seen, Metro focusses more on presenting what is relevant to you all through a single personalised pain of glass portal from which the end user obtains instant visibility through relevant apps and widgets.

I see greater scope in this, and I expect we will see an ecosystem of hardware devices which utilise this to customise the view further, one potential scenario I could see is that you eventually are provided with a customised and relevant view based upon the relevant time/date or season even, and to boot you could even go as far as saying it will decide what applications and cloud services you may want to utilise, the possibilities (if embraced) are immense.

Instant on/off

Leading on from the tablet and cloud presence design characteristics from which Windows 8 appears to follow, it is useless doing this unless the experience is delivered to work within seconds of requests or devices being initiated. With Android and Apple app store its clear that the consumer wants to access to downloaded applications the minute they finish downloading. In previous incarnations of Windows as Microsoft users will know, the OS has rarely been able to deliver on this consumer demand, with this in part being due to the legacy underlying architecture of both Win32 and Windows services. Introduction of Windows Metro applications means even Microsoft are now focused less on how the “sysinternals” of apps and services are running and more on focus of presentation of the running applications, again which is a big step for Microsoft who I expect have some exceptionally tired development teams who are transforming this architecture.

Devices matter

Microsoft have finally realised that they can use there core strength of designing an OS that can be supported on multitudes of devices. Microsoft have been the kings on the PC device at doing this and in the tablet/mobile world they have had to respond with the popularity of Android. I see Windows 8 being probably an OS if bought on a tablet to be sunk into the cost of the device in the same way Apple do this on MacOSX. Microsoft mobile 7 has not been great on uptake, however with Windows 8, this may provide Microsoft if they rub the vendors up the correct way with a means to gain more OEM agreements. 

Consumer meet Enterprise

When you add all of my above factors up (and also the fact that you have to go and work for a living to pay for fancy tablets and OS’s) you will begin to now see ever an even larger push by consumers to support and provide the same levels of functionality that are provided by functions in Windows 8 in there day to day job. If IT in your organisation isn’t able to transform legacy IT within at least 2-3 years to meet this demand then you are going to certainly struggle. As most of Enterprise IT in organisations are finding out, the consumer is finding out about cloud a lot faster than the enterprises are without even knowing it, which is applying increasing pressure on Infrastructure, applications and the governance processes that underpin those services. Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 8 will now mean a tried and trusted household name has recognition just as Apple and Android have had with the consumer and will have the potential to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Windows 8.

When it comes to Open Source projects, Instead of learning about the intriquete technical nuts and bolts of how they work, I have focussed more on how the API, Interfaces i.e. REST, and the all round general ecosystem, and lastly what value and benefits that opensource provides to a business, and this is where my post dovetails into the relationship between this and my post title.

It appears that with IaaS solutions there is a much larger wave of projects based upon an open sourced architecture. More importantly the open source alternatives to proprietary IaaS cloud (or supposed cloud) options in the start of the Cloud computing era are extremely more ubiquitous and are becoming ever more pervasive with the more uptake of cloud. Cloud Computing is now much more different than previous computing eras when it comes down to available technological choice, which yes for the likes of you and me can become an issue when it comes to governance and control, however this provides IT with much better enablers and at a much better price point.

So is opensource going to be a better selected platform for IaaS strategy or will it still have the same uptake as experienced in Server/Client architectures? Here are some of the reasons why I think it may end up being more dominant in most larger enterprises.

Opensource and open standards have several key benefits for a cloud computing world and here are a few which I think make this statement stand true.

Scalability

Functionality wise, in order to deliver reliable performant solutions to meet the usually extremely rediculous functional requirements, the technology solution must be able to scale and be readily available to devops. Proprietary solutions can scale, however when you delve into a Proprietary technology architecture it may well be operating on an underlying operating system or service which is proprietary and inherently subject to scalability limits. This underlying dependancy creates a vicious circle of the development cycles being based upon customer volumes, i.e. if companies do not invest in a proprietary product they cannot increase R&D costs.

Accesibility

Open source has always been everywhere and readily available, however I’ve just never known it. What I have certainly realised is that with cloud the use of open source is much much more larger. Look at solutions such as EC2, Openstack and OpenNebula and this is certain enough evidence to suggest that there is a heavy accessible available amount of community and resource to tap into. And of course each of the above aforementioned have a plethora of system integrators or Consultants that have external available skill (at a price) that can work on integration and deployment of such technologies into your existing architecture.

Cost

Well this is an obvious one, however don’t think that open source projects such as Openstack or Opennebula are all completely devoid of cost, the open source model has a indirect cost associated with the integration and design of whatever solution you want to implement. This cost however in the financial budgeting world today is much more preferred by projects or programmes that build cloud solutions. Additionally the people factor cost of open source is far more preferred I feel on budget sheets than a lengthy 3-5 Year proprietary software license cost, with this cost being susceptible to additional increases and reductions in level of service OR even death of a product of that all important investment that was set to deliver what you originally asked for.

Agility

Open source is much more agile and responsive to architecture change in both functional requirement and in response to evolving changes and trends in the IT industry. With a much larger development community and not the equivalent of how a proprietary SW lifecycle operates, with a shop of paid developers this means that in response to general changes to IT trend the opensource world can much more easily adapt.

Resourcing

In regards to resourcing for support and maintenance of an open source model this was where the open source model in Client/Server architectures failed to succeed in uptake within larger enterprises. With most larger enterprises now outsourcing IT operation, the benefits of this include having a much larger footprint of employed outsourcers who have cheaper opensource skillbase.

Summary

By no means am I inferring that proprietary is going to falter in the next 5-10 years, organisations will always want to invest in technology which has the insurance of a solution that is “known” to function to a certain degree and level. Proprietary solutions will feed off of a IaaS ecosystem in some shape or form, and these will provide certainly what an organisation initially wants and also to be able to deploy known entities into an Architecture.

Opensource has the charateristics to be able to meet all of the demands that are imposed by the end consumer of the services whether this be a private enterprise or a public consumer based services. This provides interesting alternatives to the architect when decisions are made upon the roadmap and direction of where they will want to align there future IT strategy towards, and at the end of the day if Opensource fails to deliver there will always be the proprietary alternative to invest in to with a more direct throat to choke.

When it comes to Public cloud burst I have always been a bit skeptical on embracing the functionality, and this is mainly due to me naturally always being conscious of efficiency within any architectural design and strategy. In ye olden days, Cloud bursting is/was rarely achievable in any other infrastructure architectural model such as private datacentres, primarily due to the requirement to have infrastructure dormant on standby ready to service request (incuring excessive cost) and in order to facilitate a burst in workload would require upfront over provisioning of resource.

A question I ask myself (and readers might), is why does public cloud bursting make this any different? Cloud computing is based upon an operational cost however infrastructure still has to remain dormant (and be paid for indirectly) in order to be able to facilitate both your companies own burst strategy and the burst demand of the 101 other customers that you share services with, so is this really as efficient as older strategies of just provisioning hardware to prepare for a burst?

Lastly putting the practical issues of cloud bursting a side and looking back on the mistakes of the past, when you look at issues such as VM Sprawl and dreaded upfront server over provisioning, this could suggest that cloud bursting will be end up being no different. Bursted capacity will need to shrink down to its original non peak size in order to remain cost effective, so do you think developers are actually considering this in any application design and strategy? Or is cloud burst just the next big problem along with VM sprawl etc that will plague IT?

Lastly there is also the risk this might even get worse with another common old problem, many non IT business units are potentially being sold SaaS/PaaS based cloud solutions that are marketed and pitched to be able to “burst”, and with no careful control education and wisdom being provided to the business on the potential issues that this might end up turning into based upon previous incarnations of problem. 

This wasn’t an insightful post you may say, however I just thought i’d provide you with a shade of reality that might just not be something you’ve yet to consider when exploring public cloud.

Needless to say I will most definately be working on finishing some more material/insomnia cures, this will probably be on emergent developments in the world of cloud, datacentres and probably an acquisition commentary.

Keep your eyes peeled

Cost

A large slow down of adoption of more virtualisation in Infrastructure is the cost to actually run it. Virtualisation technology has certainly increased in overall cost. Compare virtualisation software available today with original incarnations and you’ll find that most vendors have hiked the primary purchase and renewal costs of this software dramatically.  You can argue that technology available today compared to original Hypervisor variants have additional functionality or in vendor talk “Bang for Buck”. However those features are also indirectly limited by cost, due to the adoption of those technologies not exactly being a turnkey implementation in large enterprises any more. Also additional features or functions in some cases perform tasks or features that either are done by alternative methods and software to provide “just enough” value to an organisation.

VM Sprawl

Ok nothing really needs to be said here about this one its old hat, but unfortunately its Stalling Virtualisation strategy. We have been subjected to sprawl since Virtualisation strategy arose. And the reality of deploying yet more management technology to control VM sprawl with a Service Catalog is expensive, reliant on knowing your business processes, reliant on educating your business and requires large amounts of investment buy in amongst many other problems.

Nothing is left except….

Tier One based workloads, and I expect they are not as widely adopted as virtualisation vendors state. There is a certainly a stall in the uptake adoption of Large Database, Middleware and Application based servers. I’ve found in larger enterprises very few are lucky to be gaining full acceptance across there organisation to be able to host Tier One on virtualised platforms. Also important to note is the physical servers hosting Tier 1 are not exactly under utilised and obtain quite good value for money. Also remember costs of designing, transformation, testing and integration of Tier 1 apps before they can move into a Virtualised world.

Lastly another issue with reviewing the potential to migrate Tier 1 workloads onto Virtualised estate is software licensing which is next on my list of stall factors…

Software Licensing

I think this is more of an issue for the more “greedier ISV’s” used, with a prime example (amongst many) being a large database company that is used by most shops. Very few actually virtualise platforms to run the software they produce based on there rip off pricing strategy. To counteract this you either have to adjust how you architect the estate with siloed clusters which incur more cost and operational complexity OR pay through the nose, and most struggle to justify to a stakeholder that the costs outweigh technical benefits.

This situation is changing (thank god) but it is a struggle to educate stakeholders that it actually is, with vendors very rarely actually stating they are Virtualisation friendly.

Summary

Its ironic that to Virtualise it is now beyond economical reach, we have excellent technologies that allow it to be done yet we are limited by increased licensing costs from Hypervisor vendors and ISV’s who have now completely tailored there licensing plans to ensure they do not fall short by it being Virtualised.

Lets hope the stall trend does not continue, Virtualisation technology has served a good purpose to organisations for many years and it would be a shame to see the further adoption of it fail due to basic greed.

Car cleaning just like IT projects are tedious at the best of times, this job took nearly an hour of my limited spare time on a Saturday afternoon, additionally it is still 5 or so degrees here which is hardly something you want to get soaked in. With all of these thoughts arriving in my head before actually doing it I thought i’d take the car down to the local hand car wash and outsource the whole shebang to my local “cheap labourers from overseas”, hey they do only charge a Fiver after all for a first class finish? I mulled over this option in the morning, eventually deciding to insource it and do it myself. Whilst out on the drive and while I was doing it I drifted into thought on how this decision would have panned out if I did outsource it, and why I decided not too. This type of strategic thought process happens quite a lot in IT for both business aligned and financial reasons, IT decision makers make decision on Outsourcing in a similar way to i’ve done with my car cleaning activity and here are some of the comparatives and analogies that I thought about while doing it;

Down and dirty

After deciding not too outsource the car cleaning activity I had to obviously use my own resources (Capex) in the garage to clean her up, the first requirement was the shampoo and water, then of course there was the bucket, all items I pay for out of my own pocket. Had i’d outsourced this, all of this cost would have been divulged in my no questions asked £5, the outsourcer would have provided all of the materials and divulged the cost, however How would I have known they were using as good a mitt as I use at home, or how would I have known they were even using a “good” grade shampoo? they could have been using fairy liquid for all I know! All questions or sometimes questions that never get raised when evaluating IT outsourcing/Cloud.

Man Power

Resourcing and project delivery was a no brainer, there is no way that just me alone could have washed and buffed off the car in as much time as a hand car wash would, my local (like most I assume) have a large volume of “cheap” labourers, where as me in my Internal operation had to unfortunately plan the day more effectively. I did of course only wash and buff off, a task that 8 year olds can do, if I were to do my usual summer routine of Wash>Buff>Claybar>Wax then this would have been a bit different, the rates i’d pay someone to do a “specialist” job like this would involve I expect a lot more time and of course money. Fact is this task was one that I didn’t need to kneejerk to do, I wasn’t rushing about trying to finish it before it got dark, it was a task that had to be done but was done in an allotted low priority slot on my day off. Again the same could be compared to how IT outsourcing deals or bespoke outsourcing with SI’s for installs get commissioned, some are done due a specific immediate need, some get planned months if not years ahead.

Service delivery quality

Quality of work today for me was probably a “must try harder” result, mainly as I know that on this car cleaning project initiative the grime and dirt will appear the next time I go out, and for me to do the full job I usually do was not something me as the business stakeholder would get large amounts of value from (i.e. looks from good looking women . I could however on the other side have outsourced this task, but in reality would I have got the same desired result my stakeholders expected? Would the women really be that worried about looking at a grubby old banger like mine in this weather? So based on the decision weigh up, I thought i’d save a little cost and do it myself and apply a little less attention to detail due to me being able to monitor the volume of effort going into the actual wash. As with a lot of IT contracts, and more especially within emergent cloud this would have been a bit difficult. Try tailoring an IaaS instance on any well known cloud services that will suit your need exactly, in comparison the car cleaners have a service at a cost that they stick too, I couldn’t say “do it for £3.50 guv but put in 75% less effort in, they have a team of guys that provide a service and pride themselves on it.

Horses for Courses

So after an hour of semi hard graft the car was finished and I was in short term monetry terms I was under budget and provided a service to my to my stakeholders that will be satisfactory. Had I outsourced I’d be sitting here with £5 less to spend on something else such as a beer or Fish and Chips for dinner to then still find that in Two weeks time I’d have the same dirty car with an unhappy Five pound less stakeholder.

Summary

To summarize this post, IT Outsourcing of either services or project implementation activity has its place and is appropriate at certain times and for certain activity within your business, Outsourcing dosn’t provide you with the silver bullet for every business requirement, however if you use the services strategically within your business it can pay dividends, do it willy nilly and you run the risk like I did of running the risk of your car being cleaned with what could be duff materials of no benefit to my paint work in years to come, and also having no tailored control over what work gets done for your money, both of course meaning you get very little pay back and satisfaction

Cloud confusion….still

Cloud confusion will still be strife with a complete lack of true understanding within most organisations of what the cloud really is and can achieve. Expect the beloved vendors to still use Cloud next year as the next big opportunity to not repeat previous mistakes in the Client/Server world. Ones thing for sure Vendors in question will continue to bet their future strategy on Cloud and they will dam as hell send us as much garbage via any form of media possible to ensure that this strategy doesn’t fail.

I expect that even more fancy web portals, API’s and technologies will grow within vendor cloud portfolio offerings and I predict (don’t laugh) we will see more vendors adopting standards within cloud offerings such as CDMI and OVF, however I do not expect this to ramp up to be completely black and white, with vendors still trying to ensure they win the hearts and minds of the consumer with product offerings before putting the consumers flexibility and interoperability first.

Hybrid cloud approaches will be more heavily utilised within 2011, I see potential adoption of hosting Test/Dev in the cloud and outsourcing your Workflow engine to a third party becoming quite popular for organisations that suffer from having Production Virtualisation environments within the datacentre yet lack of budget or flexibility to use this infrastructure for hosting Test/Dev VM’s.

Last but not least expect to see some vendors pushing portfolio offerings less directly and more via the Cloud providers they are in bed with. We’ve seen this with Email, we’ll see it further with PaaS/SasS offerings providing CRM, BI and other business application services (in enterprises not SMB’s).

Storage

Wall Street was busy in 2010 with a massive amount of consolidation and acquisition by the big fish, we saw the bidding wars and the surprise tactic purchases for the more innovative smaller fish within the world of data storage. However a prediction is that I doubt we’ll see much change here in 2011, I expect the acquisitions are merely to improve existing portfolio offerings and gain more customers. We may see some of that innovation be integrated into portfolio offerings but I expect this will be to merely to be at a level Par (No pun intended) with the 100 Pound gorilla.

2010 was a year for new optimisation technology offerings within vendor portfolios, top ones being Sub lun tiering and read cache modules. 2011 I predict and hope will bring more innovation to intelligent data placement. One hope is that we see toolsets supporting orchestration/workflow capability to align any sub lun policy to a businesses requirement and logic such as SLA and performance metric, all of course something that we do today but is all done pretty much under a headless chicken project methodology.

Virtualisation

Expect to see focus from Virtualisation companies being more within application delivery technologies, and this prediction is relevant to even traditional server virtualisation companies. There will no doubt be a big big push to get customers out to using SaaS offerings whether its vendors core product or its a product they resell to hosting/cloud companies.

This shift to SaaS delivery no doubt provides much better opportunity for vendors to make up for the licensing mistakes made on existing portfolio offerings, it also provides the opportunity to sell more indirect cloud offerings/services. My view is that the vendors whom have developed and sold application delivery technologies will continue to be dominant but at the later end of next year new emergent entrants to the app delivery space will gain traction with Cloud delivered solutions.

Expect the Hypervisor and all of its offered bells and whistle to be more or less abstracted completely, the main focus will be on technology offerings capable of the consumer applying business logic. We have seen this already with product releases from market leading virtualisation companies and we will see probably much more push in 2011 with this for the same reasons as they will push SaaS as the defacto application delivery model, which is to either sell the product better or sell products via hosting/cloud companies indirectly that know how to do it successfully.

Networking

Not a hot topic for me but I predict converged networking will still be deployed for the majority, this is a technology that requires changes in IT Efficiency and IT structure which is not something that can be introduced into and IT strategy overnight. FcOE will become “more” popular within the datacentre but I wouldn’t expect it to replace existing storage protocols purely due to cost and nested investment facts of life.

I expect 2011 will be the start of more software driven functionality, what I mean by this is similar to what we see within the world of server virtualisation and that is a move to encapsulating the underlying hardware and concentrating more on intelligent software capable of excepting business logic. This has been seen with Unified platforms in 2010 but I expect that more portfolio offerings will begin to advance on this.

Something new?

I’d hope so but wouldn’t want to predict the unlikely, 2011 is going to be a recovery year for vendors, they will want to play it safe in 2011 to gain any lost revenue over 2009/10. Expect to see obvious innovation from big corps to come from acquisition and not in house R&D, however I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. I’d like to see something new evolve, we’ve had server virtualisation evolve but i’d really like to see technology with a wow factor, its been far too long a year to be just hearing about packaged “building block” or Fancy web portals.

Summary

I’ve given a few prediction and thoughts as 2010 comes to a close, hopefully it was short and sweet enough. Some of these are more my hopes that I would like to see, i’ve got a lot more I could add but have tried to keep this concise and to the point.