Out of the Lab and Into the Datacenter - Which Technologies Are Ready?

Out of the Lab

and Into the Datacenter

Which Technologies Are Ready?Stephen Foskett

[email protected]

@SFoskett

Blog.Fosketts.net

© Foskett Services

1

Stephen Foskettis the organizer of Tech Field Day,

proprietor of Gestalt IT,strangely interested in storage,

baseball believer,all-around nerd, car nut,

Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert,former first-chair bass clarinet player and punk rock frontman,

obsessive about lightbulbs, lover of a good Manhattan,watch blogger, Apple blogger, vegetarian blogger,

dad to three kids with anagram names,grammar obsessive, avid reader,

King of the Andals and the First Men,

humanist, frequent traveler,

and (apparently) lover of his own voice

© Foskett Services 2

What’s Your Strategy?


What Are You Building?

• Techies want cool, but

companies want functional

• What applications are being

supported? What do they

need?

• How can a product or

company help you do your

job?


Classic IT Strategy


Support existing

applications

Push for

transformation

Sustaining vs. Transforming

• Conflicting demand on IT

• Concern about future

relevance

• Opportunity to bring change

• Personal growth


Sustaining IT

• Reliability

• Support

• Performance

• Seamless growth and

adaptation

Get out of

the way


Transforming IT

• Efficiency

• Automation

• Integration

• Cool toys

Make an

impact


Considering Products…

Is it sustaining or

transformational?


Looking at Sustaining Products


Sustaining Products

• Start with support - call them

and see who answers

• Consider the pedigree of the

company and product

• Separate hardware and

software considerations

Must be

reliable


Sustaining Product Clues

• Hypervisor

• Virtualization

• FC/NAS

• Converged infrastructure

• VSAN


Commodities

the datacenter went from dozens

of CPU architectures to just one

storage went from dozens of

interconnect technologies to just

a few

almost everything talks via

Ethernet


Virtualizationthe virtual hardware platform is

the secret of server

commoditization

that every server thinks it’s

running on the same hardware

this makes whole servers a

commodity

(containerization is the same

thing)


Convergence

converged infrastructure pulls

everything together into “building

blocks”

server and storage are co-

located and distributed

integration is the key


Looking at Transformational Products


Transformational Products

• What was the product

designed to do?

• How old is the design? Waves

of innovation

• Look for integration above all

• Autonomous systems

Must truly

be different


Transformational Product Examples

• Scale-out architecture

• Sharded

• Micro-services

• Software-defined

• Cloud platforms


Software-Defined

you interact with your computer

hardware using software

your computer interacts with

software on a server

server software that interacts

with other server software to

configure hardware is truly

“software-defined”


Thank You!

Stephen Foskett

[email protected]

@SFoskett

blog.fosketts.net

TechFieldDay.com

20

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Out of the Lab and Into the Datacenter - Which Technologies Are Ready?