In a software-defined data-centre; why are some of the hottest properties, hardware platforms? Nutanix and Simplivity are two such examples that lead to mind; highly converged, sometimes described as hyper-converged servers.
I think that it demonstrates what a mess our data-centres have got into that products such as these have any kind of attraction. Is it the case that we have built in processes that are so slow and inflexible; that a hardware platform that resembles nothing more than a games-console for virtualisation has an attraction.
Surely the value has to be in the software; so have we got so bad at building out data-centres that it makes sense to pay a premium for a hardware platform and there is certainly a large premium for some of them.
Now I don’t doubt that deployment times are quicker but my real concern is why have we got to this situation. It seems that the whole infrastructure deployment model has collapsed under it’s own weight. But is the answer expensive converged hardware platforms?
Perhaps it is time to fix the deployment model and deploy differently because I have a nasty feeling that many of those people who are struggling to deploy their current infrastructure will also struggle to deploy these new hyper-converged servers in a timely manner.
It really doesn’t matter how quickly you can rack, stack and deploy your hypervisor if it takes you weeks to cable it to to talk the outside world or give it an IP address or even a name!
And then the questions will be asked….you couldn’t deploy the old infrastructure in a timely manner; you can’t deploy the new infrastructure in a timely manner even if we pay a premium for it….so perhaps we will give public cloud a go.
Most of problems at present in the data-centre are not technology; they are people and mostly process. And I don’t see any hardware platform fixing these quickly….
The comedian Ben Elton once talked about a swing bin in a student flat
kitchen – the fact that it was full so it wouldn’t swing. If you bought another
swing bin and put it next to the first one it wouldn’t solve the problem – you
would just have two full swing bins. The issue here is that you have to empty
the bin when it gets full and then it works well, but of course students don’t
think like that. The same is true of the data centre. By throwing additional
hardware and software at it, however intelligent it may be, you are ultimately
adding additional complexity and adding to the problem of managing it.
The solution is to have a look at the utilisation and performance of the entire
infrastructure end-to-end, see where the bottle necks and problems are and
resolve them – only then will you have a stable and manageable data centre.