The rapid growth of unstructured data has dramatically out-paced the growth of structured data for more than a decade. It has brought huge challenges for users and made fortunes for several industry executives.
Technology providers have proven that file virtualization solves a problem, works well, and can save money. In particular, F5 (formerly Acopia) and others (e.g. Rainfinity and NetApp) have carved out nice niches consolidating bespoke filers, creating global namespaces and delivering automated, policy-based tiered storage solutions. The result has been lower costs, simplified management, and better overall IT operations.
What's next?
The most significant trend to hit the market in a decade is cloud computing, and virtually all players need a cloud strategy. Whether selling to cloud service providers or internal IT departments, the consumerization of IT is hitting virtually every segment of the market and driving the need for simplification, automation, and agility. It's also increasing requirements for integration.
In the view of the Wikibon community, from a positioning standpoint, storage vendors must move beyond the notion of file virtualization into the realm of infrastructure 2.0. What does that mean? It means developing a consistent architecture that provides soup-to-nuts automation and can deliver so-called cloud services that are both private (i.e. internal behind the firewall) and public in that they interact with the external cloud in a manner that is deemed safe, fast, simple, and cost effective.
For suppliers, moving beyond file virtualization means taking the attributes that have been most popular (e.g. global namespace, policy-based migration, tiered storage) and extending them to the cloud. Players like F5 can become a critical component of cloud strategies for internal IT departments trying to become more business model competitive with cloud service providers as well as directly selling to/partnering with cloud service providers themselves. From a private cloud standpoint, this means aggressively investing to integrate with key virtualization platforms (especially VMware) and integrating/partnering with cloud service providers through open APIs and cloud standards.
Importantly, suppliers need to understand the use cases for extending their value proposition to the cloud. In the view of the Wikibon community, the best opportunity is to help users that have aging disaster recovery processes and are looking to the cloud to provide efficient redundancy that doesn’t exist within their own data centers today. We believe most organizations, especially mid-sized companies, need help in this regard.
Action Item: Cloud computing represents a once-in-a-decade opportunity for traditional file virtualization suppliers to re-brand themselves. Marketing executives at these firms must identify pain points which can be addressed by cloud computing, particularly simplifying internal IT operations and providing data movement, protection and recovery services leveraging external locations. Product development executives at these companies must then aggressively pursue solutions that deliver clear business value to an emerging set of IT buyers under increasing pressure to truly deliver IT as a service.
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