WWT Practice Lead Talks SDS on VMblog

WWT's SDS Practice Lead James Weiser had the opportunity to contribute to VMware's VMblog back in December 2016, and he took the opportunity to make some predictions around data center automation and orchestration. An excerpt of his article is below and the full article can be viewed here.

Published on VMblog.com on Dec. 12, 2016:

World Wide Technology 2017 Predictions: Mass Adoption of Virtualized Storage Paves the Way for a Complete Software-Defined Data Center

SDS Practice Lead James Weiser

I believe 2017 will be the year that wide-scale production deployments of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) really takes off. If Software-Defined Networking (SDN) adoption in the data center happens concurrently as anticipated, then the dream of a truly automated and orchestrated Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) will become a reality.

Many enterprises have already embraced server virtualization but held off on SDS. That is because until recently, many larger enterprises felt SDS could not provide enough value-added features at the scale required. Plus, traditional storage arrays were still ingrained in many IT environments and were doing a reasonably good job of satisfying requirements. It made no sense to throw away functional equipment and take a risk on something that held a lot of promise but could not guarantee reliability and security. They saw the potential but not enough to justify a complete swap out.