NetApp predicts data management and IT trends will lead in the New Year

2019 was a year of rapid innovation—and disruption—for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multicloud as the de facto architecture for enterprise customers, organizations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernize their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads.

As a result, organizations are shifting from on-premises environments to using public cloud services, building private clouds, and moving from disk to flash in data centers—sometimes concurrently. These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but they also introduce the unintended consequence of increased IT complexity.

NetApp predicts that a demand for simplicity and customizability will be the number one factor that drives IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to offer modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and to consume those technologies so that customers can keep pace with their evolving business models. As IT departments strive to deemphasize maintenance and hardware, to reduce overhead, and to adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be crucial.

Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends that we identify in the following sections.

1. As the advent of 5G makes AI-driven Internet of Things (IoT) a reality, edge computing environments are primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was.

In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be used to build compute-intensive edge environments. This effort will lay the groundwork for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation—and disruption.

The advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. It will take a few more years for 5G data technology to spread across the entire United States. However, 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT. These environments will make possible new use cases that rely on intelligent, instantaneous, and autonomous decision-making, with low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities. This evolution will bring us to a world where the internet will work on our behalf—without even having to ask.

This AI-driven IoT innovation, however, will depend on a massive prioritization of edge computing, further disrupting IT infrastructures and data management priorities. As edge devices move beyond home devices (such as connected thermostats and speakers) and become more far-reaching (such as connected solar farms), more data centers will be placed at the edge. Also, platforms such as artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) will be necessary to help monitor complex environments across the edge, the core, and the cloud.

2. The impact of blockchain will be undeniable as indelible ledgers rapidly enable game-changing use cases outside of cryptocurrency.

The world is quickly moving beyond Bitcoin to adopt enterprise-distributed indelible ledgers, setting the stage for a transformation that’s exponentially bigger than the impact that cryptocurrency has had on blockchain in finance. 

While the crypto frenzy continues to steal the limelight when it comes to blockchain, most players in the industry understand the bigger picture of the technology and its potential. Going into 2020, we will see a tipping point for larger implementations as enterprises go a step further to adopt indelible ledgers based on Hyperledger, which represents the maturation of blockchain for wider use cases. Indeed, we will start to see blockchain go “mainstream” as it enables industries such as healthcare to create universal patient records, to improve chain-of-custody pharmaceutical processes, and more.

With such use cases validating blockchain and indelible ledgers, additional widespread adoption of the technology will drive transformation across society on a larger scale. This widespread adoption will build on the disruption that cryptocurrency has brought to finance to touch nearly every industry. As a result, new data management and compute capabilities will encourage companies to invest in indelible ledgers to build differentiated applications and to collaborate on critical, sensitive datasets.

3. Hardware-based composable architecture will have less short-term potential against commodity hardware and software-based infrastructure virtualization.

Continued improvements in commodity hardware performance, software-based virtualization, and microservice software architectures will eliminate much of the performance advantage of proprietary hardware-based composable architectures, relegating them to niche data center roles soon. 

Hardware-based composable architecture is being hyped as the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture enables CPUs, networking cards, workload accelerators, and storage resources to be distributed across a rack-scale architecture and to be connected with low-latency PCIe-based switching. 

Although composable architecture does have potential, standardization has been slow, and adoption has been even slower. Meanwhile, software-based virtualization of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware-accelerated) compute and networking virtualization solutions, offers much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.

Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly. However, most organizations that must transform within 2020 will be best served by a combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerization.

VirtualWisdom 6.3 enhances infrastructure capacity planning to deepen visibility, simplify capacity management, control costs

Virtana introduced latest version of VirtualWisdom, its hybrid IT infrastructure management and AIOps platform for mission-critical workloads. VirtualWisdom 6.3 is the initial product launch since Virtana’s rebrand in October, and continues the company’s push into capacity management with global storage array analytics, an expanded range of integrations, and new portable reports and dashboards.

Mission-critical hybrid applications combine resources in public clouds, with physical or virtual resources residing in private data centers. For these crucially important workloads, operating at web-scale, managing cost, performance, and capacity has never been more complex or important. 

To gain the insights and operational control that deliver efficient, cost-effective operation, organizations need real-time visibility, automated discovery, AI-powered analytics, and immediate access to best-practice solutions that proactively solve infrastructure-related performance and capacity issues for critical applications.

The VirtualWisdom release features the new Capacity Auditor, a global storage array analytic that offers a unique approach to global capacity management designed to provide app-centric insights and intelligence across hybrid infrastructure and multi-vendor data storage environments. With Capacity Auditor, organizations have a broad view of storage usage and trends across all storage arrays, applications, locations, physical storage assets, and effective capacity.

The VirtualWisdom 6.3 release includes support for Oracle’s Solaris, Red Hat KVM, and Pure Storage solutions that provide all the power of the VirtualWisdom platform to applications using infrastructure within these environments, and management of infrastructure elements that live within them. It also enhances VirtualWisdom’s continuous real-time infrastructure discovery with simple, intuitive dashboards and reports for servers, storage, and networks. Enabling immediate insights into critical relationships between infrastructure elements, visibility into vital statistics, and the capability to automatically apply customizable information sets for identification and cost.

The offering empowers users to share collective insights, dashboards and reports across the VirtualWisdom community. Customers and partners can easily exchange best-practice monitoring reports and visualizations unique to specific environments and applications. Its hybrid, real-time application views make it easy to visualize hybrid applications that cross multiple technology boundaries in one view – including applications that span multiple clouds (AWS, Azure), virtual environments (VMware, KVM, HyperV, PowerVM) as well as physical systems.

VirtualWisdom provides real-time, data-driven lifecycle recommendations to assure performance, speed problem resolution, automate workload optimization, free-up capacity, and ensure resource availability. AI-powered capacity forecasting helps organizations avoid capacity-driven problems before they can happen, and AI-powered workload optimization keeps applications operating within SLAs.

“To provide organizations with a competitive advantage, IT needs to use and manage their resources efficiently. IT professionals need tools to enable them to quickly resolve problems, even as the infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex. They also need to automate as many of the mundane IT tasks as possible,” said George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. “Powered by AI/ML capabilities, VirtualWisdom offers recommendations and automated problem resolution, providing customers with deep infrastructure visibility.”

“The Virtana VirtualWisdom platform has been a fundamental enabler of our mission-critical manufacturing technology solutions and services for many years now,” said Todd Weeks, Plex Systems Global VP of Cloud Operations. “Our ability to offer our customers nearly 100% business continuity in a highly efficient cloud infrastructure relies on the real-time infrastructure visibility and AI-powered analytics that are unique to the VirtualWisdom platform.”

“Digital transformation is driving exponential data growth as today’s enterprises must have global visibility into all storage resources to continuously meet these ever-growing demands. Point solutions to managing data sets across multiple vendor storage environments result in highly fragmented, manual and wasteful practices and resources – and can put entire applications at risk,” said Tim Van Ash, SVP of Products at Virtana. “With application aware, predictive insight into the underlying digital infrastructure, VirtualWisdom offers the industry’s first and only global infrastructure capacity auditor and forecaster that can providing real-time visibility into mission-critical digital workload infrastructure.”

Rescale debuts ScaleX Government, its federally compliant HPC cloud service

Rescale announced Wednesday that they are the initial company to deliver a completely cloud-based HPC platform for the public sector. Rescale’s latest offering, ScaleX Government, is the only fully managed HPC service that delivers the scalability of the cloud with FedRAMP Moderate (In-Process), ITAR compliance, or both.

With this announcement, Rescale can now be found in the official FedRAMP Marketplace. This enables federal engineers, scientists and researchers to shift outdated, fixed IT infrastructure to the latest in on-demand cloud architectures and meet their compliance requirements. 

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), a division of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), co-sponsored the FedRAMP application with Rescale, to accelerate its energy efficiency and exploration research. HPC in the cloud makes it possible to instantly scale workloads up or down as needed, without requiring resource management that often results in long wait times. This ultimately leads to better research, faster results, and more efficient spending.

Until now, HPC in the cloud has been inaccessible for all Federal Agencies and many research institutions because cloud products and services cannot be adopted without FedRAMP status. ScaleX Government delivers the first cloud HPC service that is compliant end-to-end across every constituent element, including compute, storage, application management, and orchestration stack.

Tripp Lite expands offerings available on BIMObject platform; helps architects, engineers design efficient data centers

Tripp Lite, manufacturer of power protection and connectivity solutions, announced on Wednesday that it has expanded its IT infrastructure solutions available on the BIMObject platform, providing additional design tools for data center architects.

The BIMObject platform is a growing digital content management system for building information modeling (BIM) objects. The cloud-based platform provides architects, builders, engineers and interior designers with robust and accurate 3D representations of components used in building design. 

It also integrates with computer-aided design and machine execution systems and helps designers facilitate collaboration and decision-making, raise efficiencies and cut costs.

The breadth of Tripp Lite solutions available on the platform now includes wall-mount and floor-standing rack enclosures, UPS systems, PDUs, power strips and KVM switches.

Tripp Lite BIM files integrate into compatible three-dimensional design software such as 3ds, ArchiCAD, AutoCAD, ifc, PDF, Revit and SketchUp.

“Including products in the Tripp Lite BIM catalog helps data center designers conceptualize and render realistic, space-efficient and cost-effective plans,” said Tony Locker, Tripp Lite’s vice president of product management for enterprise solutions. “By developing BIM files of products, data center designers are able to incorporate photo-real drawings of IT infrastructure solutions with confidence that the items’ geometry and appearance are represented accurately within the plans.”