EDITOR’S QUESTION
needs, can live anywhere and can even
move locations during the lifecycle of
the workload. With digital infrastructure
we’re talking about infrastructure that
allows you the freedom to take on new
workloads as they come, especially
because it’s an infrastructure that is
built with a mindset of multi-cloud and
not with a specific tied up selection of
discrete pieces.
Best practices
From the get-go, build a flexible
infrastructure based on hyperconverged
infrastructure (HCI) as the foundation
for an enterprise cloud and realise that
this infrastructure will need to integrate
with the multiple public clouds in a
seamless way.
PAULO PEREIRA, DIRECTOR, SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING – EMERGING MARKETS AND
EASTERN EUROPE AT NUTANIX
raditional infrastructure
is typically collocated
across a limited number
of sites and integrated to
some degree dependant
on the components
chosen. Typically, in such scenarios some
decisions dictate upcoming ones and
soon enough the IT staff are left to deal
with a huge complex system riddled with
constraints that hampers their ability to
deliver anything that wasn’t thought of
from the start.
T
The traditional data centre stacks are
complex and leave IT staff with limited
time to learn new approaches and
innovate. Yet innovation is exactly what
is needed to survive in this high-tech
world. There are multiple options for
public clouds, multiple technologies to
be leveraged and IT staff need to have
30
Issue 03
enough space to keep up with the pace
and learn how to make the best use of all
that is available.
A Gartner analyst David Cappucio last
year declared, ‘the data centre is dead,
and digital infrastructures emerge’,
stating that ‘the IT they have known
for decades is changing – radically’
and recommends that infrastructure
and operations leaders should ‘make
a plan based on business needs at the
application or workload level, and not
just based on the physical infrastructure’
and ‘pick partners based on their vision,
capabilities and their partners’.
A digital infrastructure is one that is not
tied to physical hardware or a physical
location but is instead functional. One
where the decision or architecture of a
certain workload is based on business
Partner with suppliers that are interested
in enabling a cloud economy and not
suppliers whose survival is dependent on
selling the same old technology that got
data centres into the complexity they are
in today.
HCI is a foundation and not a destination.
To build the infrastructure of tomorrow
you need a new approach and new skills.
Nutanix infrastructure affords IT staff the
time to build these competencies.
In this new era we need cloud builders,
regardless of the physical location of the
equipment or ownership of the physical
assert (private cloud or public cloud).
At Nutanix our vision is to create
software that makes the data centre
infrastructure invisible. It’s not a matter
of public cloud or private cloud, it’s a
certainty that there will be a combination
of both and our aim is to offer customers
choice in what infrastructure or cloud to
use for each workload.
This level of agility can’t be achieved
with the traditional IT architecture
and Gartner recognises our unique
approach in their Magic Quadrant
for Hyperconverged Infrastructure
with the statement ‘highly innovative
and scalable architecture that is
generationally advanced compared with
most rivals’.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com