One of the keys, according to Abel, is IT change management and the ability to adapt ever faster whether we are talking about cloud or web scale or post-cloud. “We are into an era of ICT where it is acceptable to have lots of ‘failures’ — in business terms, not systems going down — provided we fix and learn and keep going forward. The business and the IT have to collaborate ever more closely on what I would call ‘innovation technology’ from now on. But when do get it right for the market, the immediate essential is the capability to scale it out, to absolutely industrialise it very quickly.”
Web scale, any scale
Already award-laden and identified as a leader in web scale IT is the relatively new kid on the block Nutanix. This particular San Jose four-year old has specifically targeted web scale as the better way of designing and managing data centre infrastructure with five essential ingredients that exemplify current thinking:
- Hyper-convergence on x86 servers
- Intelligence in software
- Distributed Everything
- Self-healing Systems
- API-based automation with rich analytics
The Nutanix business pitch for its ‘virtual computing platform’ is almost a slogan: “the benefits of web scale are real at any scale”. “We see it as very much part of the cloud generation but a new and better architecture for the private cloud in the enterprise, based on what the public cloud providers have developed for scale, agility and economy,” says Howard Ting, Nutanix senior VP for Product Development and Marketing. “There are clear differences, for example an Amazon or Google might make 100 and more production changes in its environment every day while a typical enterprise might make one every 100 days. But when you look at that variable agility, you realise that once everything is portable and soft, traditional enterprise IT has no way to match that speed and agility. One clear response is to adopt in the enterprise those web scale architectures that power the big public cloud services. We would certainly argue also that most of what web scale is about is not about size. It’s about speed and economics and fractional consumption and simplicity in management. So it’s about web scale at any scale.”
Analytics is fundamental to the Nutanix approach, Ting explained, not least for efficiency. “In a typical enterprise you have one human administrator for perhaps 500 servers or virtual machines. In the web scale world you could have one administrator managing 10,000 machines. They are doing the job with software and analytics and the key ability design for failure and allow commodity hardware to fail in place.”
“It’s like the new approach in security, the shift in thinking, which no longer attempts to simply keep all the bad guys out with firewalls and so on. Now the trend is to assume that they will break in but stop them gaining or doing anything. We design for failure with resilience that allows something to fail in place with no impact on performance. That also means maintenance and upgrades can be done without bringing the service down.”
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