5 Key Considerations for the NexGen Data Center

I was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

In this episode, we discuss the history of virtualization, challenges with providing API to data centers, how companies are dealing with security differently, and Interop 2016!

Below are my five key takeaways from the conversation.

1. I think the biggest thing is not to be scared of change when it comes to providing legacy services on top of new infrastructure or new technology.

So going from our server hugging ways, and two, embracing virtualization and getting to that kind of virtualization nirvana. I call it virtualization nirvana where we’re about 80% virtualized. I think 3.0 which I haven’t really given much thought in extension of 2.0, but 1.0 was moved definitely doing what we were doing before but much more efficient and much faster, 2.0 is changing how we do it and 3.0 is a complete embracing of that cloud culture.

2. There was a big hooplah around cloud management platforms, such as OpenStack a couple years ago, a lot of excitement around that initially, but not a lot of uptake.

When I talk to clients about OpenStack, the eyes roll back. But, when we have conversations around cloud native applications, dock or containers, anything that’s related to providing the API to the data center. There’s an awful lot of excitement around– excitement and challenges around that concept versus what we looked at, what we thought would be cloud native a couple years ago.

3. What we’re asking to change the data center in a fundamental way. We’re asking to give access to the data center.

So, compute, storage, networking, directly to developers via API. Instead of a developer coming to us asking for a traditional VM, us providing a VM to them. Whether that’s via a self service portal or some type of manual procurement process. We focused on the VM as the measure, as the basic measurement for data center resources. No longer are we asking for that. What we’re asking for now is to just give the developer a API a la AWS. To say, that you know what? They’re going to provision their applications and application resources as they see fit. That’s a bit scary because we don’t know how to manage that today.

4. Security is always a challenge.

I’m seeing or I’m hearing from my management consultant days. I’m hearing board members bring up the concept of micro segmentation. That’s a concept that’s hard for some of the IT guys to get the ideal that we’re going to segment layer two traffic from one virtual machine or one physical piece of hardware to another one. And board of directors are having this type of conversation– setting business line goals around micro segmentation and securing the data assets of their organization. So security is by far on the top of the minds of everyone within the organization.

5. There’s an awful lot of cool sessions within my chair or within my track that I’m interested in at Interop this year.

Specifically, we have a guy from PWC – a presenter from PWC – talking about how the new economy impacts the data center. One of the parallel tracks talks about the future of networking. All of these vendor-neutral conversations really get me interested, focused on the macro problems or the macro challenges within our industry versus a vendor-specific view. So I’m really looking forward to that vendor-neutral conversation again.

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company looking to help buyers find the best security software, business intelligence systems, and more. Interview conducted by Josh Bland.