On the heels of launching VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5, its important to round back on how critical it is to implement and run a modern data center. To deliver on the capabilities of a digital business, there’s no question that IT organizations must modernize and automate their infrastructure, and transform their data center operation into a cloud environment – one that is fully automated and self-service. But what infrastructure should underpin this new cloud environment?
The bad news is that the journey to digital breaks all of the traditional infrastructures that have been put in place over the last 15 or 20 years. The good news is that a rapid shift in data center technologies will enable enterprises to optimize existing IT and legacy investments to free up resources for next generation IT that will transform the business. We see these new technologies as pillars for the modern data center.
So what are the pillars of the modern data center?
The storage medium is changing. Flash and ultimately persistent memory will be the dominant vehicle for storing data. Why? Because it delivers the performance required by next-generation applications, while delivering increased performance for traditional applications with better economics than performance disk.
The architecture for a lot of systems in the Modern Data Center will be scale out in nature. Scale-Out is a requirement because every business will be dealing with customers generating three orders of magnitude more data – scale-out enables IT to efficiently manage massive capacities with very few resources in a way scale-up systems cannot.
We think many organizations are going to go down the path of putting in place a software defined data center. Software-defined on commodity hardware delivers the economics needed to work at massive data volumes. After all, our customers will have 1000x more data, but not 1000x more budget. This new software defined model also automates the configuration and deployment of IT services, delivering greater business agility and a more flexible, programmable approach to managing data services.
It’s also critical that traditional data center infrastructure be cloud enabled. Why? So that an on-prem data center can take advantage of public cloud economics non-disruptively.
All of these pillars are built on a solid-foundation of trust, which means they need to be secure, highly available with world-class support, because at the end of the day this is going to be the foundation of the brand of each company as businesses invariably move online.
As you can imagine, these pillars are the design points around which we’ve architected our product strategy, particularly our converged infrastructure portfolio, which offers the best way to deploy a modern data center. They’re at the heart of our recent VxRail, VMAX All Flash, and DSSD D5 launches. They’ll be at the heart of announcements we make at EMC World as well. If a business is to operate with the agility, speed and efficiency required of the digital era, its IT organization must deliver a modern data center built upon technologies that can enable it.
