Much talked about, but little explained – let’s look at the trends behind the acronyms set to become a big reality for many more enterprises in 2015.
When people want to talk to you about ‘Software Defined Networks’ and ‘Network Functions Virtualisation’, you could be forgiven for glazing over. But they are both just technical ways of saying that we stand at the beginning of the end for proprietary vendor hardware, and put an end to the idea that if you want a firewall or a switch or an optimisation device, then one must be carved out of metal and shipped to you.
SDN & NFV are changing everything
Big Technology exists because of the evolution toward increasingly virtualised, software-defined, user-driven datacentres. NFV was first coined more back in 2012, while the term SDN is far older. Neither was really threatening to revolutionise enterprise IT until about a year ago, which was our cue to launch the whole BigTec proposition around datacentre transformation.
Today’s focal point for enterprise IT resources – even the provision of desktop computing – is new datacentre infrastructure fed by virtualisation. This is all about the ‘power’ of software over its hardware environment. Understanding that, and being part of the solution that helps customer achieve that, is key to the credibility of any reseller that wants to stay relevant and grow its business in the face of this enormous change.
Sadly many resellers still aren’t prepared, not just at the technical level, but operationally in terms of how the next generations of solutions are going to be procured and supported. As an industry we’ve all sold tin for so long it will be hard for some to let go of the old maintenance agreements, install projects and sales commission structures that make less and less sense as technology advances. Annuity based revenues and ‘as-a-Service’ business models are inevitably going to replace the big CAPEX investments and proprietary hardware approaches.
Hyper Convergence and the road to web-scale IT
These software defined datacentre infrastructures are going to become increasingly dominated by flexible, converged platforms that combine compute and storage capabilities agnostic to the customer’s choice of hypervisor/s. Look at Gartner’s magic quadrant and Nutanix is the furthest ahead here in terms of completeness of vision. A NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation) platform that sits top of rack to control the network services within that datacentre is also essential; such as the Pluribus server-switch. Read more about what makes these two a match made in heaven.
Nutanix also has a lot to say about web-scale infrastructure, and again this is turning from ‘talk’ into real revenues as customers in the UK and around the world clamour to reap the benefits. But what is web-scale?
Mammoth web companies and cloud providers like Google, Amazon and Facebook were the ones to pioneer new principles for datacentre architecture which rewrote the economics of providing on-demand IT, and provide extraordinary flexibility, responsiveness and other benefits. But most businesses aren’t like these ones, right? That’s why Nutanix’s pitch is to deliver the power of web-scale infrastructure as a turnkey solution for the enterprise datacentre, for any application at any scale. It’s the essential infrastructure building blocks for VDI projects, big data initiatives, private or hybrid cloud deployments – the list is endless…
It’s all for nothing if the data isn’t secure!
Security is a massive challenge with virtualisation, because new software-defined datacentre architectures transmit data east-west as well as in the traditional ‘north-south’ sense. This leaves big gaps in datacentre security, and the race is on to find coherent, workable solutions that don’t slow down the enterprise’s desire to adopt cloud, virtualisation and SDN.
For this we’ve identified vArmour as an exciting new vendor with a unique offering, well ahead of its competition in understanding this new environment. vArmour’s technology was several years in the making and takes a post-virtualisation perspective on the security challenge, operating on the premise that in a highly virtualised environment circa 83% of the traffic is within the datacentre and doesn’t traverse the traditional perimeter. As traditional gateway devices sit at the perimeter this means that enterprises will have no visibility of the machine to machine traffic within their datacentre
The reality for enterprise IT in 2015 is that SDN, NFV etc. are coming home to roost. The hype is over, the talk is finished, now the business really starts to ramp up!
Rest assured all of these vendors are fully committed to working in partnership with the channel to drive high-margin opportunities with those resellers ready to keep pace with rapid market evolution.
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