For the last two weeks I was (more or less) on vacation, so I haven’t published any post on my predictions for 2011. But I’m not worried because I’m sure many articles about this kind of semi-astrological practice bombed you. I will recap various opinionists’ thoughts on: cloud, VDI, storage
cloud
2009 predictions for 2010 were about a wide adoption of cloud, but what we saw in practice? Near to nothing. And the predictions for next year are very similar! Yes, sooner or later, cloud will have an important role in our enterprises but for now there are many IT managers still not convinced to put their data in the cloud.
Why? It’s simple: performance, SLAs, vertical scalability, legacy applications to deal with, risky (one way) migration paths and so on.
Public cloud is still a niche market, it is an interesting and innovative niche but it remains a niche at the moment. Now, enterprises are more interested to realize integrated stacks and build private clouds to consolidate, rationalize and simplify their IT, I’m sure they will start here and then they will approach the public with an hybrid model in a future (at least 2012).
To recap all about cloud the best thing I found in these days was a Dilbert comic strip.
VDI
Will 2011 be the year of VDI? NY (no or yes).
What is the difference between ’10 and ’11? More robust VDI software stacks? Better technologies to store PC VMs?
VDI is all about TCO, the TCO model with recent technologies (with big/huge desktop numbers) is already good and nothing has changed. Probably the prediction is based on the huge number of PoCs (Proof of Concepts) made last year, I think many (sales) people would like to monetize some of their work about VDI so the push continue.
Another problem for VDI adoption in the next future will be the new mobile platforms. Tablets (not only from Apple) will invade the market; many players are already developing alternative Apps to deal from within the tablets, without taking in account that many new enterprise applications are web apps!
The main risk is to swap the PC installed base with tablets before a serious VDI (and relative thin clients) adoption because they are simpler to use, cheaper and nearly unmanaged devices! (And we go back to talk about cloud again… mobile devices are cloud ready, VDI is not!
storage
The hottest IT segments this year (no surprise) will remain storage. From the vendors point of view: Xiotech and Pillar are still on the market to be acquired and many big vendors need to complete their products lineup/stacks. On the other side data is growing and growing and enterprises want solutions to better deal with their data.
Many new startups are coming, another time with cloud in their mind, to build cloud storage solutions (Scality and Nasuni are only the firsts two that comes to mind). The key arguments will be Scale-out storage, federation, automation, integration (especially with VMware and Hyper-V).
That’s all, happy new year!
