Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on Cloud Computing, service orientated infrastructure, Devops, and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here's six great articles from the week of March 28th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy!
The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away," Gartner said. "However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points."
When you’re moving terabytes of data across hundreds or thousands of nodes, or from one environment to another (e.g., from a Hadoop cluster to an analytic database) you can’t afford to have it lagging across the network for too long. If you’re looking to process and analyze in real time, latency needs to be as close to zero as possible.
If you play this out and think about cloud as a service-delivery model, built on standardized technology building blocks (e.g., converged infrastructure) that will be increasingly hidden from the customer, you begin to see the potential long-term benefits for customers who, truthfully, want to run their businesses, not be IT experts.
They need solutions that just work, so the cloud seems like a perfect match for them, but it’s not quite that simple. When you look at cloud backup solutions, from an IT perspective, they for the most part look pretty good. But perspective is everything.
An analogy that I would use is that it's much easier to build a custom designed home using wood, fasteners, or other materials than to build a house from pieces of another home. The more primitive the parts, the more flexibility you have when building solutions. Rather than trying to reuse a living room.
A lot of my storage colleagues believe that Fibre Channel is rock solid and will remain the storage transport of choice for years to come. My response is, "that's what the telecommunications guys said about VOIP." I'm sharing this wisecrack because I believe that Cisco's multi-hop FCoE for the Nexus 7000 and MDS will help accelerate the Fibre Channel to Ethernet storage transition. The storage guys won't like this but they better acknowledge it.
Image Credit: Paul Nicholson
