Exclusive interview: Nlyte CMO asserts data centre future is hybrid

This year's DCD Zettastructure event in London had many industry experts attending, including Nlyte's CMO, Mark Gaydos.

In an exclusive interview, Gaydos discussed the ever-evolving data center industry and the implications for all involved.

"Applications are becoming more and more important and it's all about delivering computing infrastructure. The public cloud is the big thing that has entered the market and is changing everybody's approach," says Gaydos.

"However, despite some people saying 'we're going to be all public cloud' or 'we're going to remain with our own data center', talk to Gartner or companies like us and they will tell you the future is the hybrid world.

Gaydos says the public cloud and its constant evolution has caused a massive shift in peoples' thinking.

"People are benefiting from more efficiency and transparency around what they're doing. Therefore, the future is a hybrid world where the applications are going to drive the structure of how computing is delivered," says Gaydos.

"Public cloud isn't good for all workloads which is where hybrid setups can step in and continue to evolve.

According to Gaydos, the looming Brexit and GDPR regulations are going to cause huge changes in the data center industry in Europe.

"Brexit, if anything, is going to cause people to determine where their workloads can be run and how they  are  going to accommodate it. It's not going to make it easier, it's probably going to make it more complex to manage where you're storing data," says Gaydos.

"And it's the same with GDPR. Data Centers have run like cowboys for a long time - it's been like the wild west even though it's here in Europe. People are now having to have more control, reporting, audit reports and compliance (among others) around what they're doing.

Gaydos believes that, contrary to what some may believe, every single facet of the computing industry is set to grow in the future.

"Some say we've only scraped the surface of the application revolution, so I think we're going to see massive expansion in colocation - it's already a competitive market and you constantly see companies acquiring one another to try and get to scale with Amazon and Microsoft etcetera," Gaydos says.

"If you have your special niches, then I believe the smaller colocation providers can focus on special services like high security or high redundancy. There's certain niches that I believe many of the organisations out there can service and do better than the big guys, as while  they may be proficient at servicing the bulk of the market, there's always those left with unique needs.

In terms of advice for those wanting to prepare their data centers for IoT, Gaydos says to look at a multi-tiered strategy that understands what you need access to as fast as possible and what can you wait for.

"Use cases drive the world because the use case is the problem that people have, the thing that they want to do. Use cases like IoT are very dependent on what are you grabbing, how important is it, how fast do you need it and how often is it changing," says Gaydos.

"That will drive whether you're going to have edge servers or central servers, a data center or whether you want to be with Amazon or Microsoft, for example. My advice would be understand the use cases - do that and you will know exactly what you should do from an infrastructure strategy perspective.

Gaydos also spoke about Nlyte's strategy for the future in this ever-changing industry.

"Strategically, the world is going hybrid so what you can see from us coming out in the future is the rolling out of solutions that help companies understand their hybrid approach and strategy. Edge is getting bigger, so we're going to be investing a lot into our existing edge solution to ensure it stays on the pulse of change," says Gaydos.

"Big data is part of the IoT element and as such we're going to be releasing solutions around big data to give people access to that information to act on it. Security at a physical level is becoming more and more important. You can expect in the near future some new solutions from us in the security area around physical infrastructure.

This includes the recently released Nlyte Discovery, a tool to provide transparency within a network.

"Discovery allows us to explore everything that's on the network with an agentless technology for as far as you want to go, and we have new throttling technologies so that we don't overwhelm the network," says Gaydos.

"With that we're now gathering real-time asset information. Using Discovery you can begin to take on new use cases around assets that we do already with power.