Facebook is turning to a disaggregated racks strategy to create a next gen cloud computing data center infrastructure
Think “Dell” and you may think “PCs,” “servers,” or, even more broadly, “computer hardware.” If so, you are missing out on one of the biggest transformations going on among technology providers today as, over the last 5+ years, Dell has acquired multiple software companies and is using that intellectual property (IP) to drive its internal turnaround. In this sixth installment of my interview series with Brett Roscoe, General Manager, Data Protection for Dell Software, we discuss how these software acquisitions are fueling Dell’s transformation from a hardware provider into becoming a solutions provider.
2014 may eventually come to be characterized as the year of the tech break up. Tech conglomerates such as CA Technologies, HP, IBM and, most recently, Symantec have all opted to go down the “break up” route while others such as Cisco and EMC continue to experience internal and external pressures to pursue this option. But as enterprises look to create more agile, automated, cohesive infrastructures, it may be ultimately leave those such as Dell and Oracle that are opting to “make up” best positioned to deliver on these enterprise demands.
There will always be those organizations and individuals that will buy hardware and software at the lowest possible price, assemble these pieces themselves and then support the solution in production. But the time where organizations have to assemble the underlying components for key applications such as databases, email, file servers and now even backup has largely passed. In its stead, canned solutions such as appliances, converged infrastructures and reference architectures have emerged as the future of corporate IT.
2013 has become the year where discussions around software-defined data centers, networking and storage have gone mainstream. But when I talk with end-users from a number of organizations, they are somewhat scratching their head over why there is so much buzz over this technology. Most are looking to acquire and deploy technologies in their environments that are simpler to deploy and manage – not harder. As such, they sense these new software-defined solutions may only take them back in time to a place they do not want to be.
As many new and existing vendors (Scale Computing, Simplivity, Pivot3, Nutanix) come out with these “Datacenter (DC) in a Box” and “Compute in a Can” types of solutions it is worth noting that these are not only for SMBs but also solutions that enterprise shops should consider as well.
Every organization likes more storage capacity at a lower cost per GB. What makes them nervous are the growing risks they face from data loss as a result of a failed hard disk drive (HDD) in their virtualized environment. In this fourth part of my interview series with Scale Computing’s Global Solution Architect, Alan Conboy, and its EVP and GM, Patrick Conte, Alan chimes in as to what Scale Computing has done to eliminate the exposure window associated with failed HDDs.
IT staff in midsized organizations face a peculiar challenge: it is expected to be masters of the technology in use at the organization as well as being up-to-speed on all internal business initiatives. To accomplish this twin feat, they need a new type of product that takes the best technologies available today, packages them as a single SKU and then makes it easy to install and manage.
About a decade ago, give or take a few years, a huge debate raged in the storage industry as to what was the best form of storage virtualization. However all that debate created over time was an equally large sense of fatigue with many people souring on the whole topic of storage virtualization. To resolve that, the term “storage virtualization” has been given a facelift at the 2013 EMC World and with it a politically correct name: Software Defined Storage – that is available from EMC as EMC ViPR.
The need of businesses for greater responsiveness from their IT departments is driving data center automation. Data center automation requires a new approach to network architecture that results in networks that are flat for high performance, multipath for high availability, and open to orchestration for quick provisioning and re-provisioning as application loads move within and among data centers.
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