Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), Sustainability and Green IT

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many readers that virtualization has brought (and continues to bring) huge benefits with regards to data center efficiency. I’m sure you are all aware of how virtualization allows you to do more with your servers; no more single server – single application paradigms. No longer do you have huge amount of compute resources left idle on your servers. By being able to run many operating systems and many applications simultaneously on the same single server (server consolidation), virtualization brought a halt to server sprawl and data center expansion for many of…

The continued rise of HCI, and especially vSAN

This morning, twitter is alive with VMware’s Q4 2016 results. In a nutshell, its been a phenomenal quarter. Of course, the first thing I wanted to check out was how vSAN did. “Outstanding” is the word. At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona, we were somewhere around 5,500 vSAN customers. Today, that number stands at 7,000. In the space of a year we have more than doubled the number of vSAN customers globally. There is no doubt about it, but Hyper-Convergence is hot. The recent acquisition of SimpliVity by HPE demonstrates this. [Update] As does NetApp’s intention of getting into the HCI…