Nirvana in the Data Center

Good morning, LinkedIN! Today i want to deliver a message that is on the minds of IT personnel at every company, at every level, every second of the day. That is efficiency in the Data Center. I have worked with hundreds of customers along side of @JamesMonforte in helping our customers conquer their Data Center challenges. James and I talk often about how to reach a state of nirvana in the DC and this is what we came up with.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, nirvana is the highest state that someone can attain, a state of enlightenment, meaning a person's individual desires and suffering go away. 

In technology, we live in a hybrid world. Imagine a seamless web of compute, storage and network resources clustered in a platform that proactively and robotically cater to the requirements of the applications and to the needs of the user. This is creating an overwhelming enlightenment enabling IT to focus on innovation and revenue generating business initiatives.

It wasn't long ago where the days of a Software Defined Data Center began it's journey allowing for an on premise solution to react to the demands of IT in minutes. Meaning, we no longer have to rely on the network, storage, and compute teams for provisioning resources. The tightly coupled SDDC eliminates mundane processes; by allowing orchestration to automate these processes with end to end visibility and management control.

Over time, after wide adaptation of the compute virtualization saga, Storage and Network virtualization kicked up some dust and steamrolled its way into the market, alleviating vendor lock in. This will forever change the storage and network market leading to the defacto standard HCI platform. HCI is the entry point into SDDC or what James Monforte, CDW's Principle Solutions Architect, labels as "invisible infrastructure". In the beginning there were around 50 partners in the industry and now we have our clear leaders drilled down to about a handful, capitalizing 90% of the market.

So lets talk about why organizations are adapting to this "invisible infrastructure":

Now that we hit on HCI lets talk about the magic of application portability with seamless movement and scalability based on policies around risk, cost, and performance across a hybrid environment. Well it exists…somewhat. The easiest way of accomplishing this, without layering on additional abstraction layers from 3rd party products, is with VmWares native functionality. Lets face it, you purchased Vsphere & Vcenter 10 years ago and stayed status quo since but VmWare never stopped innovating and neither did their partners. VCF (Vmware Cloud Foundation) created a VM and Application management platform encompassing VMWare's SDDC and management engine, allowing you to move across the hybrid cloud. Were not talking containers here, this is your core applications with the same familiar management Vmware brings to the table. A recent release of HCx (the magic behind VCF) supports KVM and HyperV as well. Which is pretty amazing by the way. Nutanix, Hpe, DellEMC, Cisco, are all adapting similar ways of doing this natively or creating validated VCF hardware.

Truth of the matter is, Cloud is good, Hardware is good, both have their place for workloads and we're here to help you define the placement of workloads today and set those policies to move or create new VMs. Now that we identified the key players, where do you go from here? The question here should really be "Why CDW". So, lets get into that.

CDW is in the unique position of having one of the largest customer bases in the world. We see what is trending VS. WHAT WORKS in the market and have helped numerous customers on the same journey you are about to start. Whether you are starting with HCI or Hybrid Cloud we are here to help. Our contact information is listed below. Drop us a line, we would love to hear what your nirvana looks like!