The Rise of Cloud-Managed Data Centers

My co-founder and CEO Sirish Raghuram recently posted Platform9’s 2015 Predictions on VMBlog. We think the topic is important enough that it deserves its own blog post.

2014 marked the year when Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) became a common term in the dictionary of enterprise IT. When first coined as a term by VMware and published during VMworld 2010, enterprise IT was still trying to grapple with the meaning of private cloud and why they should care about it. Over the past few years however, private cloud, and hence SDDC to efficiently enable private cloud, has not only become a well-understood concept but also a top priority for enterprise CIOs.

2014 also became the year when open source technology started giving serious competition to proprietary virtualization technology and management stack. 2014 saw open source frameworks such as OpenStack become a key part of CIOs’ agendas, and open source container technologies such as Docker starting to gain strong popularity.

Historically though, a challenge with successful deployment of a private cloud within enterprises has been the complexity around the software stack involved and the difficulty in getting an agile, self-service private cloud up and running without having to deploy an army of DevOps engineers. Running a private cloud based on open source software only further complicated the matters, as you needed in-house expertise to install, debug, patch, update and upgrade the open source software stack.

A recent trend in enterprise datacenter management promises to solve this conundrum. ‘Cloud-Managed Data Center’ is an innovative approach wherein enterprises use the management frameworks that offer them a good balance of features and cost, but consume them as Software-as-a-Service offerings. This approach has been popular in many aspects of our lives till date, and is now making enterprise datacenter management significantly simplified.

In 2015, ‘Cloud-Managed Data Centers’ will come to the fore in various forms: