The hyperscale infrastructure used by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook delivers extreme performance that upends the way service providers and IT managers do business. Using commodity servers, networking, storage, and a DIY approach, enterprise IT managers are able to respond to the demands for mobile and cloud.
Historically, the IT pendulum swings between divergence (using best-of-breed components) and convergence (turnkey completely integrated and engineered systems) every 5 to 10 years. DIY is a swing back to divergence, as are the software-defined data center, elastic infrastructure, bare-metal infrastructure, containers, and object storage.
What makes the current trend unique is that while divergence is gaining momentum, so is convergence with hyper-convergence, engineered systems, appliances, and software-defined compute/networking/ storage that is shrink-wrapped in hardware. Most IT managers see the paths as contradictory, but that is not always the case.
This report explains which approach offers the best short-term and long-term results in operational efficiencies, adaptability, manageability, and the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Key highlights from this report include:
- Financially unsustainable, storage costs are now the largest single-line item in the IT budget.
- DIY storage minimizes costs significantly by using off-the-shelf server components.
- Hyper-convergence improves storage scalability and manageability, but introduces potential vendor lock-in.
- No one answer is right for every IT organization or every storage project.
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