Why Your Cloud May Be Getting a Lot Smaller

Rethinking the physical infrastructure. We’ve come a long way from mapping one application to one server. The modern infrastructure has become a lot more compact with the advent of powerful converged platforms. Even rack-mount servers have become exceedingly more powerful and efficient. As the data center and cloud model continue to evolve, you’ll begin to see micro-cloud environments pop up. In using blade systems or other converged platforms, you’re able to deliver every cloud component under one roof. Nutanix, Simplivity, Scale Computing and several others are redefining the concept of a unified platform. Moving forward, the data center will become a lot more efficient and a lot more compact. 

Incorporating logical controls. Just as the physical platform and underlying hardware resources have evolved – the logical layer has progressed as well. Software-defined technologies and advanced levels of resource virtualization are literally creating the virtual, or software-defined, data center platform. In using bandwidth and resources more economically, data centers are able to replicate data between geographic points much more effectively. Also, these logical controls introduce the concept of a “commodity cloud.” Basically, you’ve got all logical controls with commodity hardware (network, storage and even compute) at the back-end. The great part here is that logical controls allow you to manipulate workloads and data without depending on the underlying hardware.

Software-defined technologies. Let’s get a bit more specific here. There is now a software-defined acronym for pretty much every component in the data center. The entire modern data center can be seen as software-defined component. That said, storage, network, compute, security and cloud computing can all be abstracted into the software-defined layer. Basically, this means better monitoring, management and control capabilities. This also means a smaller cloud footprint. The great part about software-defined technologies is that agnostic nature of the software. Soon, it won’t matter the type of hypervisor your running or even what type of underlying hardware you have. The software-defined controls are capable of managing your entire cloud and data center platform from a logical layer.

New types of convergence (creating micro-clouds). The concept of convergence is really taking off. Many organizations are deploying purpose-built converged systems for a variety of purposes. A Nutanix system can host virtual applications being delivered via the cloud while HP’s Moonshot chassis is helping you process numerous parallel, cloud-based workloads. The point is that converged platforms are a very real piece of the modern data center and are definitely being widely adopted. Their efficiency, ability to scale and resiliency make these systems very attractive. Plus, the right type of converged infrastructure can be very cost effective.

Better data distribution. Our ability to scale our data now versus what it was just a few years ago is hard to measure. As we lay down larger fiber networks and optimize wireless infrastructures, our ability to deliver rich content over great scale will only improve. This type of data distribution over a powerful logical network allows data centers to be more distributed and smaller. It also allows the data to live closer to applications, users and required resources dynamically. Still, given the trends, it seems that there will only be more data and information to process. Open-source platforms for Big Data management are also allowing organizations to control and quantify valuable information across the cloud.