Before writing this column, I looked back at an article that I wrote five years ago with my predictions for the beginning of the new decade. It focused on some of the new developments related to the physical facility and how it might be impacted by the then recently introduced cloud computing. It looks like that vision of the future is here in full force. The issues and definitions of the “data center,” as well as who wants to own or operate them (especially for the enterprise), have become more complex as the related titles in the C suite have expanded (CIO, CTO, CSO, etc.), as well as CFOs, who tend to see colos and cloud service as “utility computing,” financially strategic operating expenses rather than depreciating fix assets for a data center facility. Needless to say, the concept of an application bound to a dedicated server is now nearly obsolete thanks to virtualization, a term and technology that now encompassed the data center itself, hence the virtual data center or “VDC.”
Moving even further, we are now entering the age of software defined everything (SDE) (which began as software defined networks “SDN” and later software defined data center “SDDC”), wherein IT hardware is no longer purpose built or whose role is no longer even clearly delineated (e.g., server, storage, network), and is perceived as the new panacea. In some cases this was motivated by large customers wanting lower priced, generic hardware (directly sourced, bypassing the major OEMs, e.g., “no-frills” hardware a la open compute). In others cases, it was developed to be the next generation of universal “bare-metal” hardware, designed to run open source software, which is architected to overcome the limitations/bottlenecks of moving bits between the “dedicated” and siloed category of devices.