Gartner: Broadcom's VMware licensing policy drives devirtualization trend

In its annual analysis of tools and technologies for data centre infrastructure operations, the market research company Gartner has identified an emerging trend towards devirtualization. The trigger for the latter is Broadcom's licensing policy following the VMware takeover, which according to Gartner estimates is causing expenditure for on-premises virtualization projects to skyrocket two to threefold. The cost increases are difficult to justify, particularly for large workloads, as these only benefit from consolidation to a limited extent.

As a result, re-hosting on physical servers, i.e. devirtualization, may become a viable alternative for companies. However, Gartner points out that the additional expense of setting up their own fail-safe structures, for example, must be taken into account when making the switch. Nevertheless, Gartner currently considers devirtualization to be a highly beneficial data centre concept that will succeed in making the leap to the productivity plateau in the next five to ten years.

Revirtualization faster in the productivity phase

Revirtualization - i.e. the migration to alternative hypervisors - as a way out of VMware dependency is expected to reach this level in two to five years. It is currently at its hype peak. However, additional operational burdens, such as unsuitable or missing administration tools, must also be taken into account here.

In addition to the digital twin of a network, Gartner also lists emerging new memory technologies such as MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) and ReRAM (Resistive RAM) among the other innovative approaches. Incidentally, direct chip cooling or direct-to-chip liquid cooling to minimize the cooling effort in the data center is also at its hype peak in the current Gartner analysis. It will be another five to ten years before they are generally ready for the market and introduced. Market researchers believe that immersion cooling is currently in the disillusionment phase, as is the concept of IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

For software-defined infrastructure, on the other hand, there is initial promising application experience. CCA (Continuous Configuration Automation) is already one step ahead. It is widely accepted and is expected to be used in almost 75 percent of data centers in the next two years.

Once a year, the market research company Gartner publishes a comprehensive analysis of trends in data centers. In it, the hype cycle methodology is used to illustrate the development of acceptance and relevance of individual trends and technologies over time by distributing them along the hype cycle curve: Trigger of innovation, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disappointment, finally realistic assessment and plateau of productivity, i.e. mainstream adoption.

(mki)