Our eighth prediction concerns the shift in the market towards software – specifically that ‘Software Defined’ strategies will become vital for large enterprise customers and vendors alike, but that they will remain highly political and divisive. Why? – virtualisation has arrived in the storage and network markets, allowing traditional arrays, gateways and routers to be replaced with software running on ‘industry standards’ (almost always Intel Xeon) servers. NFV, Open Flow, Open Stack and RESTful APIs, splitting data and control planes – these are all technologies and practices smart vendors need to master to win business. There will be a growing battle between VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI in networking; as well as between IBM SVC, HP’s StoreVirtual VSA, NetApp’s onTap and EMC’s ViPR in storage.
[to continue, click HERE]
