Although our topic is invisible technology, Lee uses a very visible example to make a point. “A trend that will undoubtedly grow is for video walls in offices showing colleagues in other offices, perhaps worldwide, other members of a team or whatever. You can imagine how it would add to a feeling of team spirit, collegiality and so on. But that depends on the general availability of huge bandwidth that can be taken for granted. It’s coming, because the forecast is that by the end of this year there will be over 250 million gigabit connections in the world — and accelerating growth.”
Consumer invisible
Cloud continues to be our through line in describing and perhaps defining invisible technology. Francis O’Haire, CTO of Data Solutions, points out that the obvious and visible benefits of cloud services to the users distract us from the fact that behind the curtain, as it were, are some very smart people and a lot of very complex infrastructure. “In fact, ICT has been pretty well invisible to the consumers for years. Think of ever smarter phones with complicated apps that just work and nobody really questions how.
Every business is trying to focus more on the front end, what it is doing with its customers and employees, and does not want to have resources tied up in essential but not value-adding infrastructure. They see that old 80:20 rule, with the bulk going to ‘keeping the lights on’. But of course the reason is that keeping those lights on is actually complex and we still often have legacy architecture in our computer rooms and data centres,” Francis O’Haire, technical director, Data Solutions
“In the same sort of way, every business is trying to focus more on the front end, what it is doing with its customers and employees, and does not want to have resources tied up in essential but not value-adding infrastructure. They see that old 80:20 rule, with the bulk going to ‘keeping the lights on’. But of course the reason is that keeping those lights on is actually complex and we still often have legacy architecture in our computer rooms and data centres.”
But in the meantime, as O’Haire points out, the Google, Amazon, Facebook and other technology leaders long since realised that they could not scale as they needed to with that type of legacy architecture. “Those giants could afford to develop and invent their own technology and in many respects a key element is the smart automation that all of them use to deliver web scale computing. Where Nutanix comes from, for example, is taking the advances and innovations made by those web giants and offering it as similarly invisible technology in the back room. That includes, by the way, a great deal of open source technology as used by the web scale corporations. It aims to offer a solution that is automated and scales in the same way.”
Ongoing costs
O’Haire emphasises that web scale computing is not necessarily as expensive as many in the market suggest. “There is an entry level and businesses that are looking at this kind of technology need to have an appreciation of the true ongoing total costs of IT — not just the boxes and pieces of kit. At the moment this is a boxed solution, the appliance approach, but in fact the magic is in the innovative software coupled with a constant process of improvement and invisible updates across the infrastructure.
“This type of web computing does not require the traditional weekend working — and hope to be finished by Monday morning — to upgrade hypervisors, storage, firmware, network configuration and so on,” O’Haire explains. “It is actually done during working hours, invisibly, with no impact on performance. The IT people can see what’s happening on the nice screen displays. But they don’t have to do anything. That’s invisible infrastructure.”
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