ISC West—the International Security Conference and Exposition—provides insight into some of the biggest trends in the security industry. The conference attracted more than 30,000 attendees and nearly 1,000 vendors earlier this month. DCIG analysts planned our attendance at this year’s conference with a focus on video surveillance, especially video analytics. We had an eye-opening experience.
Virtualization largely shaped the enterprise data center landscape for the past ten years. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is beginning to have the same type of impact, re-shaping the enterprise data center to fully capitalize on the benefits that virtualizing the infrastructure affords them. Enterprises considering HCI as a replacement for existing core data center infrastructure should give special attention to how the solution implements quality of service technology. Superior QoS technology will reduce OPEX by simplifying management and reduce CAPEX by consolidating many workloads onto the solution.
Hard to believe but the first day of autumn is just two days away and with fall weather always comes cooler temperatures (which I happen to enjoy!) This means people are staying inside a little more and doing those fun, end of year activities that everyone enjoys – such as planning their 2019 budgets. As you do so, solutions from BackupAssist and StorMagic are two key new technologies for companies to consider making room for in the New Year.
VMworld provides insight into some of the biggest tech trends occurring in the enterprise data center space and, once again, this year did not disappoint. But amid the literally dozens of vendors showing off their wares on the show floor, here are the four stories or products that caught my attention and earned my “VMworld 2018 Best of Show” recognition at this year’s event.
When organizations deploy HCI at scale (more than eight nodes in a single logical configuration), cracks in its architecture can begin to appear unless organizations carefully examine how well it scales. On the surface, high end and standard hyper-converged architectures deliver the same benefits. They each virtualize compute, memory, storage networking, and data storage in a simple to deploy and manage scale-out architecture. They support standard hypervisor platforms. They provide their own data protection solutions in the form of snapshots and replication. In short, these two architectures mirror each other in many ways. However, high-end and standard HCI solutions differ in functionality in ways that primarily surface in large virtualized deployments.
Organizations of all sizes now look to hyper-converged infrastructure solutions such as the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to provide them with their next generation of data center IT infrastructure services. As they do, they need software optimized for protecting Nutanix environments. HYCU, Inc., and Rubrik are two early leaders in this space. Each possess distinctive attributes that make one or the other better suited for providing data protection services when these conditions exist in your environment.
Hyper-converged infrastructure architectures (HCIAs) are foundational for the next generation of data centers. Key to realizing that vision is to implement HCIA solutions for both primary and secondary storage. The Cohesity DataPlatform and Rubrik Cloud Data Management solutions have emerged as the early leaders in this rapidly growing market segment. While these two products share many features in common, seven key points of differentiation between them yet exist as the latest DCIG Pocket Analyst Report reveals.
When one examines enterprise data protection and data storage products through the lens of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) designs, one would think each product either supports an HCI architecture or it does not. But as one begins to see when one scrutinizes this topic, the answer is not a simple “Yes” or “No”. Nuancing how well or if a product fits into an HCI design, one first needs to think about the question or even the series of questions that he or she should ask to properly make this assessment.
At the end of the year people naturally reflect on the events of the past year and look forward to the new. I am no different. It is as I reflect on the past year and look ahead on how IT infrastructures within organizations have changed and will change, 2017 has been as transformative as any year in the past decade if not the past 50 years. While that may sound presumptuous, 2017 seems to be the year that reflects the tipping point in how organizations will build out and protect their infrastructures going forward.
Hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIAs) radically simplify the next generation of data center architectures. Combining and/or virtualizing compute, memory, storage, networking, and data protection functions from a single vendor in a scale-out cluster, these pre-integrated appliances accelerate and simplify infrastructure deployments and management. As such, the stakes are high for Dell EMC and Nutanix who are competing to own this critical piece of data center infrastructure real estate.
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