ESG Blogs

This is exciting stuff, so let’s jump right in.

First on the financials, which are sure to dominate the headlines. It’s a stock merger with Cloudera stockholders getting 60% stake in the new entity and Hortonworks stockholders obviously getting the other 40%. The combined organization is initially being valued at $5.2 billion, with Hortonworks having found positive cash flow by offering robust support services across the data analytics pipeline and Cloudera too relying on incorporating support within its subscription-based pricing model.

With VMworld approaching next week, I thought I would share what I’m expecting to hear and what I’m looking forward to on the HCI front in Vegas.

I’m excited about the shift and spotlight HCI has garnered over the last year. It’s gained traction, it’s gotten more competitive, and it’s being recognized as much more than an x86 server with compute and storage. It’s about incorporating networking, ensuring workload mobility, properly managing distributed clusters, data lifecycle management, and embracing hybrid cloud. And while all of these aspects will be key areas of focus at the show as whole, let’s focus on HCI.

With the growth of data and the focus on becoming more data-driven, many organizations have turned to Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark as their big data and analytics framework to store and process their data. While the solutions are quite powerful, to effectively manage a constantly evolving infrastructure that must continue to meet the demands of a modern business, it can quickly become a logistical and administrative nightmare. With the understanding that organizations have plans to adopt cloud technology and one of the top use cases for existing IaaS and PaaS users is for data analytics, the idea of leveraging an Hadoop- and Spark-based managed service in the cloud is quite appealing.

Going into Google NEXT, I expected announcements across the entire cloud business. Between their recent (positive) financials, customer traction and (more importantly) growth, and a rapidly expanding list of offerings and managed services, I expected announcements to focus on what I view as their areas of differentiation: foundational built-in security by design, commitment to open-source technologies in their own and across clouds, core AI and ML solutions and services that are embedded/ integrated across GCP services, and easy-to-use cloud-native collaboration products in GSuite. While I’ll let my colleagues share their thoughts on security, mobility/devices, and dev/ops, I’ll be focusing my recap on analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) are anchored in virtualization—virtual storage, virtual compute, and virtual networking. And we know the big names in the hypervisor space: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Recent ESG research asked organizations what they consider to be their primary hypervisor deployed in production. Fifty five percent of organizations selected VMware vSphere, while another 36% primarily leverage Microsoft Hyper-V.

Organizations are being told to digitally transform, to become more agile, and to respond to the business faster in order to survive in a highly competitive market. And one way organizations are digitally transforming is by modernizing their infrastructures, which means shifting from a traditional 3-tier architecture to a solution that integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualization. Such a solution must deliver a more cloud-like experience on-premises, making the eventual transition to the cloud easier or better yet, enabling organizations to confidently move cloud-native applications from the public cloud back to an on-premises private cloud. Both converged infrastructure (CI) and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) fit the bill, but what is driving organizations to pick one over the other?

Having taken a few days break from the color orange, I’m ready to share my thoughts on Pure Accelerate. The show started with Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo talking about stools, with the three legs of a stool representing the core components of the data center: compute, networking, and storage. We were left with a new Pure vision anchored in storage, but focused on more than storage: a data-centric architecture that addresses the simplicity, agility, and performance requirements of the modern business. 

Well Nutanix .NEXT has come and gone and as I continue to digest all the announcements from Nutanix, one word comes to mind that expresses my thoughts: ambition. Why? They don't want to just be the HCI infrastructure in a data center. They want to be the data center. They want to enable hybrid cloud. They want to enable multi-cloud. They want to simplify the smart edge and enable IoT. And they want all the complexity associated with all of it to be invisible.

We’re off and running at DTW 2018. As expected, there’s been a whole slew of announcements, but for this blog I’ll be focusing on data analytics, specifically AI and ML. Dell EMC is starting to weave a very effective story across all of their product lines, between their server, storage, and workstation divisions, their Ready Solutions, and Services (think pillars of the modern data center).

In February of this year, Dell EMC announced the VxBlock System 1000 solution as their converged infrastructure (CI) solution to help enterprises speed IT transformation by removing the physical boundaries of traditional CI. And of course there were some updates on the success of that launch and early traction. On the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) side of things, they made announcements related to VxRail and VxRack. And while these announcements may not be as futuristic and forward-looking as some of the AI and ML topics discussed in my other blog, they’re all part of Dell EMC’s concerted efforts to help modernize enterprise infrastructures to meet enterprise goals of being more operationally efficient while enabling organizations to embrace a hybrid- or multi-cloud approach.