The Future of the Modern Data Center

The evolution of the data center and IT as a business unit has been more exciting than ever in the past few years. But the coming few years are likely to bring even more excitement than before. Some of the technologies that are currently in development and could be in data centers in the next few years are simply mind boggling.

Scott D. Lowe

March 02, 2016

IT Transformation

The world’s largest automobile manufacturer, the Toyota Motor Company, is well known for producing an extraordinary amount of cars. Their high production capacity is thanks to the “Toyota Production System” which is studied worldwide and is regarded as an engineering marvel.

Scott D. Lowe

February 24, 2016

Understanding Hyperconvergence

Hyperconvergence is a hot button topic in many IT organizations today. Much the same as software-defined storage (which we discussed in a previous article), there’s a bit of confusion in the industry around what constitutes a ‘hyperconverged’ architecture.

Scott D. Lowe

February 17, 2016

The SDS Landscape

What does and doesn’t qualify as software-defined storage is a topic of discussion amongst many IT professionals. Fortunately, the answers are pretty straight forward. In this article, we’ll look at what is and isn’t really software-defined, and also look at the two primary ways that SDS is enabled from a technology standpoint.

Scott D. Lowe

February 10, 2016

Transforming Your Data Center

In this post, we’re going to discuss the transformation from a legacy, inefficient data center to the modern data center, which is characterized by its efficiency, simplicity, and ability to provide business outcomes.

Scott D. Lowe

February 03, 2016

Principles for an Agile Data Center

In our last post in this series, we talked about how expectations of the IT organization, it’s applications, and its datacenter infrastructure are much higher today than ever before in the past. Think about it for a minute - software as a service (SaaS) applications running in the public cloud (think Gmail and Dropbox) are agile enough to add new features and functionality, seemingly on the fly and with zero downtime.

Scott D. Lowe

January 28, 2016

How Changing Technology Expectations Are Changing the Enterprise Datacenter

In the not so distant past, the most advanced technology that most people had visibility and access to was the technology at their company where they were employed. Most people were introduced to the personal computer when it arrived on the desk at their company.

Scott D. Lowe

January 05, 2016

The Adoption of Software Defined Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure in 2016

IT budgets are shrinking. Demands on IT are increasing. Data center technology has become a quagmire of complexity. Traditional storage has struggled to keep pace with workload demands. With these challenges, CIOs, technical decision makers, and IT staff members are looking for ways to continue meeting critical business needs with solutions that stabilize data center costs while also being simpler to manage. Perhaps the biggest challenges facing the data center today revolve around storage. It’s expensive. It’s complex. And, until flash became more common, it suffered a great deal with regard to performance.

Scott D. Lowe

December 08, 2015

Convergence and the Software-Defined Data Center

In a previous post, we saw a history of data center storage and ended by discussing the fall of the monolithic storage array. In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at the data center trends and architectures that are enabling that transition away from monolithic storage arrays. First, we must step back and look at how we got here.

Scott D. Lowe

November 10, 2015

Data Center Evolution: The Rise & Fall of the Monolithic Storage Array

In our last post, we looked at the challenges and opportunities in front of IT organizations as they move into 2016. We kicked off that discussion by considering the organizational shifts happening in IT, as well as the new cost models for procuring and operating IT in the data center and how this changes what enterprises expect from their data center vendors.

Scott D. Lowe

November 09, 2015

2016 & The Year Ahead for IT: Realities, Shifts & Opportunities

A significant number of IT organizations around the world are spending the next 45 days looking at the opportunities and the realities they’re going to face in 2016. Demands on IT are up; complexity is spiraling to the outer edge of control, and of course, budgets and in-house IT skillsets aren’t automatically keeping pace.