HISTORY OF CI, Part 3: What’s to Come, From What We’ve Learned (2016–Present)

What’s to Come, From What We’ve Learned

Did you miss the first two parts of our CI history series? Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 today.

Pandemic Accelerates Infrastructure Demand

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, enterprise IT came under huge pressure to deliver the usual suite of services, but suddenly within a highly distributed organizational model. In addition to maintaining essential applications and services, projects appeared literally overnight that demanded a new, secure approach to remote working. Pandemic lockdowns around the world accelerated and validated that most workers can be productive outside of the office, provided the required IT infrastructure is in place.

Looking ahead, offices of the next decade will transform. Of course, many employees (depending on their roles and industries) will still need to work on-site. However, many other roles will be reassessed, opening up work-from-home and other remote options.

Another key to enabling the remote, dispersed workforce is using software to automate more IT tasks. The associated technologies of storage, server, networking, and virtualization are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to optimize performance, predict usage, and dynamically allocate resources. The amount of operational data collected and analysed also needs to be represented in a holistic visual style. Dell Technologies software, such as WaveFront and CloudIQ, illustrate important advances in this arena.

The Importance of Infrastructure Automation

Supporting the evolving workplace will take a strategic balance between on-premise private cloud and the broader, enterprise-wide multi-cloud strategy. One key consideration: does the planned technology support forthcoming application development or line of business investment? Deploying a blend of on-premise and public cloud solutions helps mitigate these very real concerns about data privacy, regulation, and compliance. It’s now well-understood that on-premises technologies can mimic the experience and capabilities of the public cloud, and, in many cases, be delivered at a comparable or lower cost.

Now that many IT organizations are focusing on both data and enterprise data management, they’re looking at how to drive the best result using a multi-cloud approach when engineering data warehouses, data lakes, and associated repositories. Ongoing innovations introduced as part of VxBlock converged infrastructure show why VxBlock is well positioned to provide a set of bedrock services that IT professionals can rely on to help them deliver the capabilities that are increasingly needed by IT shops globally.

VxBlock Systems have always been at the leading edge of innovation in private cloud adoption. Upgradability and flexibility, while adhering to a rigorous set of engineering standards, definitively sets the tone for future enhancements. VxBlock is uniquely designed to accommodate traditional technologies on the same platform as modern workloads with demanding application performance that are increasingly requiring large memory footprints, with very low latency storage technologies, along with high levels of automation.  VxBlock 1000 is architected to facilitate upgrades to both the LAN and SAN fabrics – multigigabit LAN and NVMe respectively – as well as cost-effective migration of other components from previous VxBlock models.

Converged infrastructure was ground-breaking a decade ago when it was introduced, and it delivers foundational services on which many IT applications and workloads continue to run.  Without CI there would be no HCI, and many organizations would have found private cloud operating models very difficult to run and manage. In conclusion, we believe CI will continue to be a workhorse for forward-thinking IT departments for many years to come.