The Converged Infrastructure market today is an accelerating mainstream IT trend because it is the proven way to break down technology silos of compute, network and storage, while simplifying and transforming IT processes and operations.
Within this backdrop, we are seeing the emergence of platform 3 applications that have different characteristics from the legacy client-server applications prevalent in today’s data centers. As client-server applications grew to be more business critical over the past decade, increasing levels of robustness and data services were built into enterprise storage arrays, Storage Area Network fabrics and compute blade systems to provide business continuity, disaster recovery and data protection capabilities. In contrast, platform 3 applications – which were born in the cloud and largely tied to the megatrends of mobile computing and social media – were conceived to incorporate composite micro-services that eliminate the need for complicated IT infrastructure.
IT innovators and early adopters eager to explore platform 3 applications have often moved to public cloud for their platform 3 development projects. Others are adopting hyper-converged appliances created from industry standard servers with software defined storage, clustered together through high speed ethernet switches.
Together, public cloud and hyper-converged appliances represent a decentralization trend, driven by the rise of individual departments inside companies striving to meet their departments’ unique requirements – usually without regard of the ramifications to rest of the company or the company’s overall IT strategy.
The new reality now is the emergence of islands of hyper-converged offerings stacked together, and unmanaged public cloud consumption. Central IT, when they are unable to provide economical, scalable, easily provisioned resources to their departments, find they have decreasing influence with their lines of business. The result is cluttered, disparate collections of resources that can’t, and aren’t, shared across the company. It’s an inefficient use of budget dollars, as well as an inefficient use of the pools of resources that underpin the entire data center infrastructure.
The industry really has not fully considered the ramifications of this ad hoc approach.
But at VCE, we have. We believe you must design and engineer scalability upfront to plan for growth, and we have contemplated massively scalable, shared hyper-converged resources with independently scalable, industry standard based compute and software defined networking, all managed through a single interface. The next phase of evolution of CI is not simply the addition of hyper-converged capabilities, it’s hyper-converged at scale.
Today, VCE expands its portfolio with the introduction of VxRack Systems, a hyper-converged rack scale system that fits seamlessly together with our Vblock portfolio within the VCE Vscale architecture.
While the main focus for many large enterprises will continue to be the consolidation of mission critical applications into Vblock Systems and our recently announced VxBlock Systems, the next VxRack Systems represent the path to highly scalable platform 3 and XaaS for distributed tier 2 applications for those ready to deploy hyper-converged offerings that can start small and scale to many thousands of rack servers.
Please click here to learn more.
Trey
