The Thinning of the Data Center in the Hybrid Cloud Era

A quarter of a century ago, on the eve of the millennium, a shot was fired that barely registered inside the walls of data centers. Launched in 1999, Salesforce would go from being yet another dotcom to a massively influential force that reshaped the way businesses buy and deploy software, pushing CRM software out of the data center — making Siebel Systems extinct almost overnight — and into the cloud. In its wake, a new category called software-as-a-service (SaaS) emerged, leaving behind a graveyard of once-mighty empires.

Data centers maintained their essential role throughout this period of disruption. The new software was running too far away from the data it needed to access, which remained confined to data centers, so these silos of storage hardware survived. Yet the data center’s grip gradually weakened as more core data center services began moving to the hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud architecture is a direct result of complete cloud adoption. Now every core service that needs scale, high availability or global access is going to be re-architected with cloud at its center. Hybrid is a way to stretch that cloud center to anywhere the data is needed. These access points may be the compute layer in the cloud or on-premise applications – they may demand data access across hyper-scalers.

The thinning of the data center that began years ago is now rapidly accelerating. The data center will look very different in the decades ahead as enterprises rely instead on the performance, flexibility, and reach of hybrid deployments.

Performance

As data and services move to the cloud, people still expect the performance they enjoyed when their files were sitting nearby in their data center. They want to work at speed and without limitations. They want support for non-cloud-native protocols. The rise in popularity of hybrid cloud deployments is 100% a result of these demands, an effort on the part of the hyperscalers and hybrid cloud leaders like Nasuni to give customers the best of both worlds.

Today, data resides in the deep, cheap, distributed object store, but the compute layer in the cloud has absorbed the thin layer of high-performance processing that once ran in data center infrastructure. Hybrid cloud deployments allow you to run thin on-premises, at the physical edge, or thin and efficient in your cloud compute layer, and still deliver powerful performance anywhere it’s needed. This degree of fluidity and flexibility is unprecedented.

The multi-protocol Nasuni Edge for Amazon S3 is a perfect example, as it bridges the performance gap between S3 storage and EC2 compute. Your data can reside next to your compute layer, as it once did in the data center. The difference is that both are now in the cloud, running as a service that you can dial up as needed.

Flexibility

The cloud has matured into a core system offering heavy, reliable, super-scalable infrastructure that companies can consume as a service. These services are no longer locked into one provider or based in one region. The maturity of cloud infrastructure has stoked a new appetite for multi-region and multi-cloud connections that can work with data across geographies and even between cloud providers.

Generally, the thinning of the data center in favor of hybrid cloud infrastructures gives enterprises a ton of flexibility. This is one of the reasons we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs.) While still expensive, VDI deployments are far more practical today because with hybrid solutions like Nasuni you can run your virtual desktops in the cloud close to the data they need to access and overcome the performance problems of the past.

The new hybrid flexibility also makes it possible to engage with cloud services from other providers — if you have your data stored in one cloud, for example, but would like to use an AI tool from another — or even move your data from one object store to another. Portability is not easy, but this optionality will be paramount for any company doing anything important in the cloud.

Reach

Finally, the thinning of the data center and expansion of cloud services has changed how we think about access, driving demand for unified architectures that span geographic regions. If you engage with a service that purports to be everywhere, then your users should be able to tap into those services from anywhere, especially with the hyperscalers extending the cloud through novel solutions like AWS Wavelength.

These adaptations should in turn change the expectations of the enterprise. You should ask for and expect more from hybrid cloud solutions. If providing access to a new location or job site demands a lift and shift, then you are not relying on a modern cloud service, as this kind of operation is a relic of the data center era. You should be able to access data in any region, stored on any provider, wherever you are in the world, and you should be able to do so with ease.

Hybrid Cloud and the Enterprise

The battle between the thinning data center and the expanding cloud is a story we have all heard before. In technology this happens over and over again. A new solution with seemingly magical properties appears, triumphs over the previous standard, and then leaves customers longing for some of the conveniences or benefits of the old-guard solution. We might not want the old data center back, but we do not want to lose its performance, either, and hybrid cloud has established itself as the bridge between advanced cloud services and highly performant local storage.

These changes can be uncomfortable for enterprise IT leaders who have long operated as if the data center is the center of data. But, , this is changing. Infrastructure is changing. Data no longer has to be tied to one device, location, or iron-laden facility., and the IT leaders who embrace the move to hybrid architectures are going to turn it into a massive win for their organization. to hybrid architectures are going to turn it into a massive win for their organization.