The Politics of ConvergenceDheeraj Pandey, Founder and CEO

2

Networking

Sto

rage

Ser

vers

VX

LAN

IP Addresses

HBA

Trunking

DN

S

LACP

Containers

Fiber Channel

OSPF

z/OS

IPMI

LOM

iLO

VT-

x

x86

iSCSI

NFS

FCoE

SM

BDatastores

SAN

NA

S

LUNsRAID

Zoning

DA

S

Divergence, in the last 15 Years3 advances challenge storage arrays at their very core

Masking

Bla

de C

hass

is Bac

kpla

ne

P-Series

LPARs

Everything virtual… and in software

10GbE & SDN

Server-side Flash

3

Converged Web-Scale DatacentersBlade servers are passé, rackmounts are in!

Business Agility

Rapid Scale

Cost Efficiency

Design Goals• No single point of failure• No single point of bottleneck• Always-on systems• Deep Analytics across all SW/HW components• Interactive visualization of entire datacenters

Fundamental Assumptions• Unbranded x86 servers: fail-fast systems• No special purpose appliances• All intelligence and services in software• Linear, predictable scale-out

4

“Breaking Away”Convergence in web-scale datacenters: Challenging the status quo

Flattening of Infrastructure

Agility in decision-making

5

Flattening of InfrastructureHow web-scale datacenters achieved convergence

Storage Software on standard x86

servers

Networking was the biggest enemy

6

Flattening of InfrastructureHow web-scale datacenters achieved convergence

Data warehousing using standard x86

rack-mounts

SQL gave way to REST/HTTP

7

Flattening of Infrastructure“It’s not happening in my enterprise datacenter”… really?

Big Data

Dev Ops

Public Cloud

8

Flattening of InfrastructureBig Data Folks: “What in the world is a SAN… and a blade server?!”

“The practitioners of big data are hostile to shared storage.

They prefer server-attached storage… The perception of

SAN and NAS is that they are slow, complex, and above all,

expensive. These qualities are not consistent with big data

analytic systems that thrive on system performance,

commodity infrastructure, and low cost.”

- Wikipedia (“Big Data”)

9

Flattening of InfrastructureDev Ops: “What in the world is a blade server?!”

Massive democratization of

infrastructure

Dev Ops takes charge: autonomy,

independence, access

Application owners become

paramount

10

Flattening of InfrastructureA brief history of the Post-SAN-Post-Blade-Server Converged era

Monolithic mainframe-like systems were

banned

Grow-as-you-go clusters are in vogue

Network topologies have been flattened

11

11

True ConvergenceFrom “Duct Taped” hardware to software-based convergence

12

With software, scale-out, not scale-up

Convergence 1.0 to 2.0From “Duct Taped” hardware to true (hyper)convergence

13

True ConvergenceReducing space, power, complexity, and cost

14

True ConvergenceThe rack-mount (x86) server is the “true north”

15

True ConvergenceWeb-scale lessons define the “true north”

16

Convergence’s True North