Essential Building Blocks of a Modern Data Center

In the software-defined everything age, the need to modernize data centers to bring them up to speed with the latest applications is a pre-requisite. You not only need to smartly manage the data explosion coming in from different channels, but you also have to analyze it and provide useful, actionable content that helps in simplifying decision making.

Keeping these new trends in mind, PCQuest organized a webinar where experts from EMC talked about essential building blocks of a modern data center required to tackle modern day challenges. You can listen to the webinar recording here.

‘The three pillars of a modern day data center are Flash storage, a scale out capable, software defined, and cloud enabled IT infrastructure”, said Srihari Palangala, EMC’s Marketing Director and first speaker. He said that USD 2.7 Trillion was spent over the last 15 years in building enterprise IT infrastructure. The next fifteen years however, are going to be different, as the focus has shifted toward digital transformation, which requires developing consumer grade mobile apps and embedded software that can transform business. So, in the future, the priority for CIOs is going to be to drive out cost from existing IT infrastructure while focusing on innovation that can help transform the business.

Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director VCE, the second speaker, talked about VxRail, a hyper-converged, fully-integrated and pre-configured family of infrastructure appliances based on VMware’s vSphere and virtual SAN, and EMC software. Rajesh explained how VxRail is the next wave of hyper-converged infrastructure. He quoted an example of how in World War II, Alan Turing built a machine that was used to decode German code. “The machine weighed a few tons, but today, you can have the power of such a device in your pocket as a smartphone, he added. Just as you have so much power in your pocket, Systems like VxRail are like having a data center in a system, he said.

B.S. Nagarajan, VMware's Technology Director for India and SAARC spoke next about other essential components of a modern day data center. “Companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have the biggest, most agile, and efficient data centers. Most enterprises also want their data centers to be like that”, he said. For this, you need hyper converged software that can totally integrate your compute, storage, and network. You also require industry standard hardware, which is already being developed with convergence of storage on x86 hardware and all tech development is following a building blocks approach.

The last speaker was Abhijit Potnis, Director-Tech Solution, India and SAARC, EMC, who stressed on flash storage as being one of the key pillars of a modern day data center. “This year will be the year of All Flash for primary storage”, he said. With this, he talked about EMC’s latest product, VMAX, which is an all flash storage, which offers performance, scale, high availability, and advanced data services for mission critical applications. The solution promises to deliver 99.9999% availability. Lastly, he also talked about DSSD D5, EMC’s latest rack scale flash storage, offering 10 million IOPS, 100 microsecond latency, 100 GB/s of bandwidth and 144 TB of raw storage in five rack units.

The session was moderated by the author of this article. It went off very well with lots of interesting questions from the audience on the future of storage and data centers.

If you have any further questions on modern data centers, please feel free to write to us.