The week of Nov. 9, I’m hosting a webinar review of the results of our 2015 State of Converged Infrastructure survey. My first choice for a headline, “The End of the Multivendor Data Center,” was rejected on the grounds that nobody believed it. OK, they’re right.
But what we’re seeing from the data is an important change in the way people are choosing and buying data center infrastructure. Within a couple of years, essentially all of our survey audience believes they’ll be using converged infrastructure solutions.
That means that the classic data center, built via a custom-engineered collection of equipment from many, many vendors, is being replaced by a product solution. The data center has been industrialized. It’s stable. There’s no competitive advantage in trying to build a better data center than you can buy.
I find this incredibly exciting. Whenever something moves from rare and special to a commodity, it creates a huge opportunity for experimentation — new and wonderful things being built on top of the commodity. Just think of all of the wacky things you can plug into a USB port!
You’d think that’s a silly example, but there’s a whole industry built on the ubiquitous access to 5-volt power that didn’t exist before the USB port. And there are people in your organization who will build unexpected, cool, profitable applications on your data center if you make it easy for them to plug right in.
When you listen to the webinar review, you’ll hear more about adoption rates, the uptake of automation, and the continued fragmentation of monitoring. It’s all useful — but keep in mind that when you move to a common, shared computing platform, you’re creating a platform for innovation. That’s the real value of computing.
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