Innovation through Internal Hacking

Innovation is a critical part of any business, particularly a software business. However, as we know from Clayton M. Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma, it is hard to innovate in a large company. The challenge is that many innovations will disrupt the existing revenue stream. But without innovation, the revenue stream will inevitably end. To remain …

Selling Containers Is Hard

How do you distribute an application that uses containers? This seems to be an odd question. Container-based applications are usually associated with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and public cloud deployment. However, there is still a place for software that is purchased and installed on-premises in a data center. If the software is in the …

Data Locality Is Impacted by vMotion

This is the third article in a series about data locality in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). In the first article, I discussed basic math around storage network IO and the effect of data locality on the storage network load. In the second, I examined the impact of HCI configurations with more than two copies of data. I’ll wrap up …

More Data Copies Means More Locations That Matter for HCI

In my previous article, I introduced the idea of data locality in HCI. I also explored some basic math that illustrates the impact of scaling an HCI cluster. I compared a cluster without data locality to a cluster that does have locality. Today, I want to look at what happens when we need more than two …