The Software Defined Data Center

The Software Defined Data Center: That was pretty much the biggest takeaway from this year’s VMworld in San Francisco. VMware made announcements about the new vSan that will be coming out soon and will enhance the software defined storage aspect and also the announcement about the NSX platform that addresses one of the final hurdles, network virtualization, to pave the path to finally have a completely software defined datacenter.

Nutanix OS 3.5: Deduplication, New GUI, SRM, Hyper-V Support

Nutanix, one of the fastest growing IT infrastructure startups around, shows no signs of slowing down with their release of Nutanix OS 3.5. For those not familiar with Nutanix, they offer a truly converged virtualized infrastructure. This generally consists of four nodes in two rack units of space, where each node has CPU, RAM, traditional fixed disk, SSD, and Fusion-IO flash built in. Their secret sauce is really NDFS, the Nutanix Distributed File System, built by the same folks that created Google’s File System, as well as a unified, hypervisor-agnostic management interface.

CERN Goes Hybrid

CERN goes Hybrid: Have you heard the news that CERN is going to the cloud? The term CERN is used to refer to the European laboratory located in the northwest suburbs of Geneva snug on the Switzerland border. The main function is to provide the particle accelerators, as well the other part of the laboratory infrastructure needed to perform high energy physics research. CERN was originally established in 1954 as The European Organization for Nuclear Research. The research at the facility has moved past nuclear research and has fully expanded into one of the largest laboratories for particle physics research using the Large Hadron Collider. On an interesting side note, the main site at CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web and, historically before that, these facilities were a major wide area networking hub for sharing the scientists research with different scientists located elsewhere.

EMC ViPR as a Part of a SDDC

At EMC World 2013, EMC announced ViPR as the answer to storage within the software defined data center. ViPR presents multiple types of storage while segmenting the control plane from the data plane. In addition, ViPR is a head end, fronting traditional storage arrays as an automation and control point and does not replace any array, but, possibly, makes it easier to use those arrays as we move to the software defined data center. Yet, ViPR also raises several questions about how storage will be accessed by the software defined data center, is ViPR the future or is there more to happen?