FEATURE: CLOUD
organisations in the Middle East achieve
their consolidation goals in a simpler way.”
Intelligent CIO spoke to Paulo Pereira.
Director, Systems Engineering, Nutanix, to
hear about the latest trends, strategies and
innovations in the field of enterprise cloud.
What should a CIO looking to
implement a cloud solution for
an enterprise be looking for?
As we build infrastructure for enterprises
there has been traditionally (a process
where) IT departments keep on buying
infrastructure for the application they want
to install.
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steps where you have to make very large
investments at the beginning and again
after two or three years. You want to avoid
this type of situation.
So if you are able to grow your data centre,
where your costs grow linearly with the
capacity that you need, this is ideal.
Can you tell me how the
enterprise data centre has
been evolving?
Let’s talk about virtualisation. Virtualisation
came and fixed a lot of problems in the data
centre. Before virtualisation you had a lot of
servers underutilised.
And then they do that one time, two times,
three times and they end up with a spaghetti
data centre. If you want to take an approach
of building a cloud you really should look at
it as an architecture that can scale.
Paulo Pereira. Director, Systems
Engineering, Nutanix
VIRTUALISATION CAME AND FIXED A LOT
OF PROBLEMS IN THE DATA CENTRE.
How important is the issue
of scalability?
If you think about it scalability is everything.
The target of every company is to grow and
as they grow their compute needs will grow
as well.
So if you pick the right architecture you will
be able to grow linearly and not have these
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Underneath you have servers that can be
from many different vendors and then
they connect to the ethernet network, they
connect to storage arrays and so on.
So, it’s many, many layers and there are
many vendors to manage. It’s so complex
that actually some vendors came up with
this concept of converged platform that is
nothing more than the same architecture
but they just build it and deliver it for you
packaged. What we’re doing is something
completely different.
So what we’re doing is completely
eliminating the SAN (Storage Area Network)
from the solution. We are using just
commodity servers and combining compute
and storage into the same nodes and
using the power of software to offer all the
features that you have from an enterprise
storage system.
An architecture that offers not only the
virtualisation, because a lot of people
try to build a cloud and they stop after
they virtualise, but you need to also think
about things like automation: How do
you automate the cloud and how do you
integrate with public clouds as well?
It’s very important because the world is
not private cloud versus public cloud. It’s
becoming a world where you will have hybrid
clouds and you will want a displacement
of your workloads on the cloud that makes
more sense to you. So these are the kind of
things that CIOs should be looking at.
And therefore these servers still need to
connect to the same storage so you need
to have a centralised storage. This was how
storage area networks became popular. So
now we are at this phase where you have a
data centre stack that is mostly composed of
a virtualisation layer.
Virtualisation came to build a layer on top
of these servers and abstract them to be
able to put multiple virtual machines in
the physical server and therefore allowing
consolidation and a lot better usage of
the assets. But all of the sudden with this
you created the need to have a centralised
storage because you want to be able
to move the virtual machines from one
physical hardware to the other.
All of the sudden you have a data centre
that is composed of a very simple building
block which is a server with storage directly
attached to it, everything else is defined
by software. So if you think about this you
build a data centre that is only network and
servers. And you scale by adding more of
these building blocks which are servers so
you scale totally in a linear way with the
capacity that you need.
Can you tell me about
how you supply the
healthcare sector with
enterprise cloud platforms?
So in healthcare there are very specific
software solutions that are used in that
market. They are very specific from a
technical requirements point of view as well
as compliance because they’re dealing with
a very critical type of information.
So what we do is we have validated our
solution with the software providers. We
have validated the performance, all the
technical details, to make sure we are able
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