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2015 will see the software-defined data centres win the mindshare battle against the single-vendor blob

2015 will see mindshare for the software-defined data centre overtake the ‘single-vendor blob’ approach to infrastructure, according to Cumulus Networks co-founder and CEO JR Rivers. Mr Rivers will explore his prediction at DatacenterDynamics (DCD) Converged in London on 19-20 November.

“The uptake of software-defined data centres has been spreading in the last year,” said Mr Rivers. “2015 is the year that the networking megavendors should be concerned about if they continue to lock organisations into their services with highly engineered infrastructure that users can’t scale.”

Organisations using an infrastructure from a networking megavendor typically find advantages in the short-term due to highly engineered, customised solutions. However, in the longer term, they can be restricted by rigid capacity restrictions and slow feature development cycles. Analysts describe the networking space as the last bastion of the single vendor blob from a profit-margin perspective1.

“Rather than accept the demand for and shift to software-defined data centres, the megavendors have responded by aggressively engineering their solutions even more to try to lock in what customer base they have left,” said Mr Rivers. “They will see those customers seek ways out of their contracts, whether that’s through an open stack or by engineering their own data centres.”

In his presentation, Mr Rivers will argue that senior IT managers using a single-vendor blob for infrastructure can only do what their vendors allow, and could be better deployed using their expertise to build an infrastructure that best serves the needs of their business.

“It will be interesting to see if Mr Rivers’ work with infrastructure managers has given him hard insights or shows a darker side of the data center manager that we need to examine,” said DatacenterDynamics managing editor Bill Boyle. “The future for data centres is in agility, creativity and flexibility so data center and infrastructure managers need to be designing those SDN architectures real soon. Whether they can do that without megavendor support will be fascinating.”

DatacenterDynamics’ Annual UK event will take place in London on 19-20 November.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by DatacenterDynamics Converged .