The last couple of years we’ve seen a major shift in the market towards the software-defined datacenter. This has resulted in many new products, features and solutions being brought to market. What struck me though over the last couple of days is that many of the articles I have read in the past 6 months (and written as well) were about hardware and in many cases about the form factor or how it has changed. Also, there are the posts around hyper-converged vs traditional, or all flash storage solutions vs server side caching. Although we are moving towards a software-defined world, it seems that administrators / consultants / architects still very much live in the physical world. In many of these cases it even seems like there is a certain prejudice when it comes to the various types of products and the form factor they come in and whether that is 2U vs blade or software vs hardware is beside the point.
When I look at discussions being held around whether server side caching solutions is preferred over an all-flash arrays, which is just another form factor discussion if you ask me, the only right answer that comes to mind is “it depends”. It depends on what your business requirements are, what your budget is, if there are any constraints from an environmental perspective, hardware life cycle, what your staff’s expertise / knowledge is etc etc. It is impossible to to provide a single answer and solution to all the problems out there. What I realized is that what the software-defined movement actually brought us is choice, and in many of these cases the form factor is just a tiny aspect of the total story. It seems to be important though for many people, maybe still an inheritance from the “server hugger” days where hardware was still king? Those times are long gone though if you ask me.
In some cases a server side caching solutions will be the perfect fit, for instance when ultra low latency and use of existing storage infrastructure is a requirement. In other cases bringing in an all-flash array may make more sense, or a hyper-converged appliance could be the perfect fit for that particular use case. What is more important though is how these components will enable you to optimize your operations, how these components will enable you to build that software-defined datacenter and help you meet the demands of the business. This is what you will need to ask yourself when looking at these various solutions, and if there is no clear answer… there is plenty of choice out there, stay open minded and go explore.
I’m the lead engineer, designer and software architect of the EVO:RAIL platform. I joined VMware about two and a half years ago. I started out in Integration Engineering, I got to see and experience a lot of the frustration that is often seen when trying to install, configure and integrate our technology. I’ve pretty much worked in web application engineering my entire career that has given me a really broad experience across consumer and enterprise technology. Before VMware I was the CTO of a really cool VC funded start-up in the UK as well as being the lead engineer over at McCann Erickson’s EMEA HQ.