I recently attended the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and had a lot of great conversations with senior IT leaders across a wide variety of industries. There were multiple sessions at the event designed to educate attendees on software-defined storage (SDS) and hyperconvergence, automation, hybrid cloud, as well as containers and DevOps. My top takeaways from the event include:
Software-Defined Storage
Gartner analysts provided many predictions throughout the conference. During one session on SDS, it was stated that by 2022, 30% of storage will be deployed as SDS, on-premises or in the public cloud (up from less than 10% today). This is largely because SDS solutions give organizations greater flexibility and enable a lower overall total cost of ownership. These benefits are realized by removing hardware vendor lock-in and allowing for a linear scale out model. SDS can also enable IT organizations to automate business continuity and enable a path to hybrid cloud use cases.
Hybrid Cloud
A consistent topic throughout the event was hybrid cloud, and moving from on-premises to public cloud. Gartner analysts stated that by 2022, 30% of enterprises will implement at least one hybrid cloud storage approach (up from 5% today). I currently see this trend in motion today with DataCore’s customers. Their goal is often to enable greater data portability and leverage public cloud resources to drive down costs. The most common use case today is using the cloud as an archive storage tier.
Automation
Automation and orchestration were an underlying theme throughout many sessions as Gartner continuously highlighted the importance of automating and orchestrating compute, storage and network solutions. Our recent market survey discovered that 60% of IT professionals list the ability to automate frequent or complex storage operations as a key business driver for implementing software-defined storage. By automating common processes, IT organizations will have more time to tackle other business critical projects.
Containers and DevOps
According to a survey conducted by Gartner, approximately 60% of IT organizations indicated they will have adopted containers by the end of 2018. This trend is having two large impacts: The first is that it is accelerating the journey to the cloud. Of the IT organizations in the survey, 89% indicated container deployments will be both on-premises and in the public cloud. The second trend is the evolution towards DevOps and CI/CD methodologies. Without changing the way applications and infrastructure is delivered, the benefit of deploying containers and microservices are often not realized.
At the conclusion of the conference, it was clear that Gartner has spoken with many IT organizations that are actively looking to adopt newer solutions like SDS and containers. It was also clear, after talking to many people myself, that there is still much for many of these organizations to learn so they can be successful. If you are looking to learn more about the latest IT operations trends and how they could benefit your organization, I recommend attending a future Gartner IOCS conference.
