Re: Software Validated Stacks
What you wrote is so true in so many ways.
It's not really what I meant though. In the olden days, certified reference designs were usually pushed by either storage or server vendor, or later, by OS and hypervisor manufacturers. Take Dell or Cisco, here is the reference design for our servers plus network plus Pure/NetApp/Nimble and VMW/Hyper-V/Xen/OpenStack/Baremetal Linux/Oracle/SQL/Hadoop.
The addition, integration, and validation of say, load balancers, software defined networking, PaaS, DR/workload mobility, backup/archive was always something handled afterwards.
Now that the infrastructure stack is "solved" the next step is to build reference architectures with these modules instead. Veeam or Zerto or Datos.io? No problem, here is how. In the same way that storage vendors knocked on Dell's and Cisco's door and submitted white papers and validated designs for their products, in the same way many of the more successful software vendors will submit theirs. Actually, they've been doing that for quite a while, most have a HPE or Cisco (and less frequently Dell) validated design.
The challenge will be in the interoperability testing and creating attractive packages. This has been traditionally the realm of VARs and system integrators on a one off and individual basis but will become more and more standardized. If the vendor's gravity is big enough and they are willing to create an ecosystem like that, it might actually work. Unfortunately, not many vendors are left that can execute due to politics. Dell/EMC is tied to Vmware so they'll most likely ride the Vmware ecosystem instead of building one centric to Dell. Microsoft might do it (and then buy/OEM the better products). I don't see HPE executing with any kind of coherent strategy. Cisco might if they get serious about data center, they have shown to play the multivendor ecosystem quite well in the past. Not sure if it will translate into the software space. We might also see large system integrators pop up with something like a Vblock but based on say Nutanix or any other platform and have standard bolt-ons like AVI for load balancing, Veeam for backup, aviatrix or NSX for SDN. You get the drift.
Then on the other end of the spectrum we see Amazon trying to write literally everything themselves. DBMS, OS, cloud platform, storage platform, load balancers, you name it! IT'S THE EVERYTHING SHOPPE! Amazon will allow an ISV to develop against their APIs but will then mercilessly copy everything they seem valuable. And of course we have Nutanix, who tries to do the same as Amazon, except that they have way less resources and money and aim to launch ten products at once whereas Amazon started slowly and only ramped up once they achieved mature service delivery (took them years).
We might of course also see a bunch of acquisitions and each vendor build their own megastack with load balancing, DR services, backup, security, etc integrated.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
