Hyperconvergence, the Blob and Godzilla
Chuck Hollis (VMWARE) , one of the industry's most talented technical strategists wrote this very informative article on Software Defined Storage. Additionally, the SDS paper discusses the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in context and adds hyperconvergence and virtualization discussion points in order to convey a well rounded and holistic message. The message is that hardware will continue to melt into commodity appliances with virtualization of every aspect of the control plane. No more routers, switches, terminal servers, DWDM, Class 5, IDS appliances, WAN/LAN accelerators, firewalls, VPN concentrators, etc. Replacing all those individual components will be a massively and deeply integrated software suite whose core component is the hypervisor. All the traditional unique individual enterprise IT components and roles will be replaced by adjunct software addon's to the hypervisor and control plane. That includes security, authentication, routing, compute, storage, networking, automation, orchestration, monitoring, reporting, ad-infinitum.
What it seems that the industry and business leaders might not intuitively be aware of is that administrative complexity of maintaining that type of "all things to everyone" platform might not be humanly possible. Imagine the job description of someone who might need to support that converged platform. The would need to know storage architectures and protocols, hypervisor operations, multi-OS experience, backups and disaster recovery, LAN/WAN, security, automation, orchestration, monitoring, reporting, firewalls, IDS, IPS, acceleration appliance concepts, etc. So the typical admin would be at the level of CCIE/CCNP or equivalent, VMWARE VCNP, EMC/HP/ Certified Storage engineer, and would know most if not all of the underlying strategies and workings of the replaced products like Cisco Prime, vSphere, SMARTS, NetIQ, Avamar, Data Doman, VNX, VMAX, XtremIO, Isilon, HDFS, iSCSI, NetApp.
Just because the vendor hides the underlying complexity of the hyper-converged platform and it's various modules with some automated install routine and a new GUI, does not mean that hyper-converged is simpler. Actually the wide variety of technologies underlying SDN, SDDC, SDS have very nearly the same amount of underlying complexity that traditional Enterprises have been exposed to for the past decade. Now it is just behind one GUI, or pane of glass. Just like the "Blob" in the classic movie, look under the hood and you will find it is bigger than the entire town.
So the question for Business Leaders is how do we ensure visibility into these hyper-converged platforms? How do we ensure we have resources with the various skills and disciplines to manage such a large hyper-converged beast? How do we silo responsibilities appropriately, yet have our admins be able to understand the entire hyper-converged ecosystem?
Having been in the forefront of Enterprise IT evolution and movement to the cloud, it does seem to appear to me that the complexity of of managing, configuring, monitoring, reporting, provisioning these systems fairly often looks a lot like Godzilla to many customers. Add to that the fact that new features come out every quarter, some versions are deprecated or functions deprecated and or enhanced or simply changed in upgrades, some products replaced or discontinued, and this upheaval is occurring nearly quarterly across a number of SDS, SDDC, SDN vendors. That is causing a lot of customer frustration with vendors. Still, enterprises stay committed to their vendor road maps.
It is ironic that one of the goals of this new technological leap is to reduce labor costs, and increase productivity and profitability, yet many enterprises cannot afford to invest in the continuing education from the vendors to stay current. Often this is because they have cut staff to the bone and outsourced until everyone is brand new to nearly everything. So staff is hard pressed to even get time to go to their own doctors appointments Still again, enterprises stay committed to their vendor road maps. It remains to be seen just how manageable Godzilla will be for most enterprises embarking on the journey to the cloud, and whether the Blob will consume all things in the end. Maybe they will find out that the myopic pursuit of cost cutting efficiency is not in their best interest, but mostly benefits the vendor(s).