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.

Gartner highlights top 10 trends impacting infrastructure and operations for 2020

Research firm Gartner highlighted on Tuesday trends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must start preparing for to support digital infrastructure in 2020. Analysts presented the findings during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, which is taking place here through Thursday.

“This past year, infrastructure trends focused on how technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) or edge computing might support rapidly growing infrastructure and support business needs at the same time,” said Ross Winser, senior research director at Gartner. “While those demands are still present, our 2020 list of trends reflect their ‘cascade effects,’ many of which are not immediately visible today.”

During his presentation, Winser encouraged I&O leaders to take a step back from “the pressure of keeping the lights on” and prepare for 10 key technologies and trends likely to significantly impact their support of digital infrastructure in 2020 and beyond.

In recent years, Gartner has detected a significant range of automation maturity across clients: Most organizations are automating to some level, in many cases attempting to refocus staff on higher-value tasks. However, automation investments are often made without an overall automation strategy in mind.

“As vendors continue to pop up and offer new automation options, enterprises risk ending up with a duplication of tools, processes and hidden costs that culminate to form a situation where they simply cannot scale infrastructure in the way the business expects,” said Winser. “We think that by 2025, top performing leaders will have employed a dedicated role to steward automation forward and invest to build a proper automation strategy to get away from these ad hoc automation issues.”

“Today’s infrastructure is in many places — colocation, on-premises data centers, edge locations, and in cloud services. The reality of this situation is that hybrid IT will seriously disrupt your incumbent disaster recover (DR) planning if it hasn’t already,” said Winser.

Often, organizations heavily rely on “as a service (aaS)” offerings, where it is easy to overlook the optional features necessary to establish the correct levels of resilience. For instance, by 2021, the root cause of 90 percent of cloud-based availability issues will be the failure to fully use cloud service provider native redundancy capabilities.

“Organizations are left potentially exposed when their heritage DR plans designed for traditional systems have not been reviewed with new hybrid infrastructures in mind. Resilience requirements must be evaluated at design stages rather than treated as an afterthought two years after deployment,” said Winser.

For enterprises trying to scale DevOps, action is needed in 2020 to find an efficient approach for success. Although individual product teams typically master DevOps practices, constraints begin to emerge as organizations attempt to scale the number of DevOps teams.

“We believe that the vast majority of organizations that do not adopt a shared self-service platform approach will find that their DevOps initiatives simply do not scale,” said Winser. “Adopting a shared platform approach enables product teams to draw from an I&O digital toolbox of possibilities, all the while benefiting from high standards of governance and efficiency needed for scale.”

“Last year, we introduced the theme of ’infrastructure is everywhere’ that the business needs it. As technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) are harnessed as competitive differentiators, planning for how explosive data growth will be managed is vital,” said Winser. In fact, by 2022, 60 percent of enterprise IT infrastructures will focus on centers of data, rather than traditional data centers, according to Gartner.

“The attraction of moving selected workloads closer to users for performance and compliance reasons is understandable. Yet we are rapidly heading toward scenarios where these same workloads run across many locations and cause data to be harder to protect. Cascade effects of data movement combined with data growth will hit I&O folks hard if they are not preparing now.”

Successful IoT projects have many considerations, and no single vendor is likely to provide a complete end-to-end solution. 

“I&O must get involved in the early planning discussions of the IoT puzzle to understand the proposed service and support model at scale. This will avoid the cascade effect of unforeseen service gaps, which could cause serious headaches in future,” said Winser.

Distributed cloud is defined as the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while operation, governance, updates and the evolution of those services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.

“Emerging options for distributed cloud will enable I&O teams to put public cloud services in the location of their choosing, which could be really attractive for leaders looking to modernize using public cloud,” said Winser.

However, Winser points out that the nascent nature of many of these solutions means a wide range of considerations must not be overlooked. “Enthusiasm for new services like AWS Outposts, Microsoft Azure Stack or Google Anthos must be matched early on with diligence in ensuring the delivery model for these solutions is fully understood by I&O teams who will be involved in supporting them.”

“Customer standards for the experience delivered by I&O capabilities are higher than ever,” said Winser. “Previous ‘value adds’ like seamless integration, rapid responses and zero downtime are now simply baseline customer expectations.”

Winser warned leaders that as digital business systems reach deeper into I&O infrastructures, the potential impact of even the smallest of I&O issues expands. “If the customer experience is good, you might grow in mind and market share over time; but if the experience is bad, the impacts are immediate and could potentially impact corporate reputation rather than just customer satisfaction.”

Low-code is a visual development approach to application development that is becoming increasingly appealing to business units. It enables developers of varied experience levels to create applications for web and mobile with little or no coding experience, largely driving a “self-service” model for business units instead of turning to central IT for a formal project plan.

In many cases, network teams have excelled in delivering highly available networks, which is often achieved through cautious change management. At the same time, the pace of change is tough for I&O to keep up with, and there are no signs of things slowing down.

Winser said that the continued pressure to keep the lights shining brightly has created unexpected issues for the network. “Cultural challenges of risk avoidance, technical debt and vendor lock-in all mean that some network teams face a tough road ahead. 2020 needs to be the time for cultural shifts, as investment in new network technologies is only part of the answer.”

As the realities of hybrid digital infrastructures kick in, the scale and complexity of managing them is becoming a more pressing issue for IT leaders.

Organizations should investigate the concept of HDIM, which looks to address the primary management issues of a hybrid infrastructure. 

“This is an emerging area, so organizations should be wary of vendors who say they have tools that offer a single solution to all their hybrid management issues today. Over the next few years, though, we expect vendors focused on HDIM to deliver improvements that enable IT leaders to get the answers they need far faster than they can today.”

Intel Solutions Marketplace for Partners enhances speed growth, innovation through global collaboration

Intel launched Intel Solutions Marketplace platform to help partners deploy solutions in an increasingly complex, data-centric economy. On the new platform, and all from personal dashboards, Intel partners can grow their businesses through new partner connections and matchmaking, receive and manage leads, monitor business performance, and market solutions to end customers. 

The Intel Solutions Marketplace is an online platform that drives collaboration in a new data-centric landscape, where users can explore offerings and network with Intel partners. For partners who have posting access, the Intel Solutions Marketplace enables network and co-create with industry providers, differentiate offerings and showcase them to enterprise end customers. 

The platform joins Intel Partner University as a key offering of Intel Partner Alliance, the company’s announced channel partner program transformation designed to help partners connect, innovate and grow in a data-centric world.

The Solutions Marketplace facilitates better collaboration between partners, helping them focus on desired outcomes and delivering customization. The platform is equipped with new capabilities that enable partners to connect and collaborate with a global network of other peer partners to jointly deliver innovative data-centric solutions to business end customers. 

Today, solutions typically include hardware, software and services in varying combinations and are increasingly being designed to solve specific business challenges. 

For example, a solution to help a municipality reduce energy consumption using smart devices could be entirely led by the services side of the business, while an artificial intelligence solution to drive predictive maintenance for reduced downtime might be led by a software or hardware vendor. The Solutions Marketplace makes this kind of collaboration easier and more efficient.

Intel Solutions Marketplace encourages partners to collaborate within an expanded ecosystem, allowing Intel partners and business end customers to research and pursue thousands of partner solutions, including Intel IOT Market Ready Solutions, artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, and next-generation computing. It enables a new way for partners to innovate, go to market and grow their businesses.

The Intel Solutions Marketplace is designed to drive collaboration across the ecosystem, making it easy for partners to connect with each other, all within the trusted Intel ecosystem. Intel will roll out enhancements throughout 2020 to help partners manage leads, monitor performance from personal dashboards and continue to grow their businesses.

Rackspace strengthens professional and managed services to boost user cloud adoption with AWS

Rackspace accelerates its growth as a full stack service provider by expanding its portfolio of Rackspace Service Blocks and its position in providing professional and managed services for Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the expansion of the Service Blocks portfolio, Rackspace further empowers customers to keep pace with innovation and capitalize on new services and features like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), and Serverless Computing. 

Rackspace Service Blocks is the modular cloud services portfolio comprised of discrete, customizable services provided on a flexible consumption model, which allows customers to only pay for the cloud services they need, optimizing IT economics.  

The Rackspace Service Block patterns are designed to streamline the adoption of AWS by consolidating broad expertise across infrastructure, applications, data, strategy and integration. 

This capability is distilled into solution roadmaps designed to help customers deploy three key types of solutions. A combination of professional services, managed cloud and advanced Kubernetes management service blocks, this offering helps customers outline their container strategy, build containerized applications and transition them into ongoing management.

It delivers a grouping of managed and professional services designed to provide customers with the tools and expertise needed to make a smooth transition to hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS. This configuration helps customers streamline analytics processes, uncover deficiencies within processes and derive meaning from data to enable better data-driven business decisions and serve their customers with accurate and timely data. 

“Our customers need deep AWS expertise that helps them develop, deploy, and integrate the latest applications, improve and secure their infrastructure, and ultimately make the most of what AWS has to offer so that they can move their businesses forward,” said Matt Stoyka, chief relationship officer, Rackspace. “Our enhancement of Rackspace Service Blocks bridges the skills gap faced by customers who are quickly maturing on AWS.” 

“For 15 years, we’ve trusted Rackspace to hear and understand our challenges, diagnose our problems, and quickly develop solutions that fit our evolving needs as a company,” said Bill Dalton, vice president of Firefly Digital. “Today, bringing their expertise to manage our entire container services journey, Rackspace ensures we’re getting the most from AWS so we can focus on innovating and staying competitive.” 

Martello completes initial phase of testing its SD-WAN offering on ENCQOR 5G

Martello Technologies announced this week that it has completed the initial phase of testing for its SD-WAN solution as part of a project with ENCQOR 5G, Canada’s initial pre-commercial fifth-generation (5G) wireless network for open innovation. 

Among the first SD-WAN vendors in Canada to initiate a project on the ENCQOR 5G testbed, Martello aims to demonstrate that its SD-WAN solution can deliver stable and predictable handling of unified communications (UC) and other real-time IoT traffic on 5G networks.

Launched in March last year, ENCQOR 5G is funded by the Government of Canada through the Strategic Innovation Fund, along with the Governments of Quebec and Ontario as well as leading industry players Ericsson, Ciena, Thales, CGI and IBM. ENCQOR 5G is coordinated by Innovation ENCQOR, and delivered in Ontario by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and in Quebec by Innovation ENCQOR, CEFRIO and Prompt.

ENCQOR 5G brings together SMEs, industry, government, researchers and academia in both Quebec and Ontario to collaborate on the commercialization of disruptive products, processes, and services, providing a first-to-market advantage and to improve the ability of SMEs to scale.

According to Gartner, in 2020, worldwide 5G wireless network infrastructure revenue will reach $4.2 billion, an 89% increase from 2019 revenue of $2.2 billion1. The enterprise will increasingly become the focus of 5G services, expanding into new real-time and mobile IoT applications such as autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, the mobile office, and agriculture and retail sector applications.

The project with ENCQOR 5G underpins current Martello projects and the development of new solutions, while fostering collaboration with companies within the alliance. Following on Martello’s successful mobile SD-WAN for autonomous vehicles proof of concept with BlackBerry QNX in May 2019, the project with ENCQOR 5G leverages the Company’s leadership and unique expertise in network connectivity for real-time and mobile IoT applications.

In the initial phase of the project, Martello has demonstrated compatibility with LTE-A, a precursor to 5G; in later phases, Martello will test UC traffic specifically, over LTE-A and 5G.

Martello’s SD-WAN and link balancing technology provides network connectivity in challenging environments, including in developing regions with a limited telecom infrastructure. With 5G emerging as the next generation network, Martello is future-proofing its SD-WAN solution to ensure that challenging mobile IoT applications on 5G networks, such as autonomous vehicles and the distributed, mobile office, stay seamlessly connected to mobile networks.

“Through our work with the ENCQOR 5G testbed, we have an opportunity to engage with many of the world’s top technology players, from Ericsson to CGI, in accelerating Canadian innovation in 5G,” said John Proctor, president and CEO of Martello. “ENCQOR 5G is central to Martello’s strategy, giving us the ability to integrate solutions at the earliest points in the development cycle and demonstrate Martello’s 5G readiness.”

“Martello is leading SD-WAN innovation on 5G networks with ENCQOR 5G,” said Claudia Krywiak, president and CEO, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), the coordinating member of ENCQOR 5G for Ontario. “Businesses like Martello are paving the way to Canada’s 5G future, with the support of private industry, federal and provincial governments.”