Evolution of the Datacenter

Early 90s

The Datacenter Emerges

In the 1990s UNIX servers replaced mainframes for running most business applications in these high end server environments. However direct server attached storage quickly became unmanageable as storage demands increased. There was no way to pull capacity across multiple servers. The result was isolated islands of storage which were difficult to manage and scale.

Late 90s

Pooled storage emerges

SAN and NAS technologies emerged enabling shared pools of storage and making it easier for datacenters to manage storage at scale. They also provided a rich set of capabilities like snapshots and deduplication for better data protection and storage utilization.

Early 2000s

Birth of virtualization technology

As the 2000s progressed VMware and virtualization began to make inroads into enterprise datacenters, while networks became faster, and adopted flatter architectures to accommodate virtualized workloads. Virtualization offers enormous benefits including higher server utilization, live VM migration for greater datacenter agility, faster deployment for new apps and greater availability and resiliency for mission-critical services.

Late 2000s

Storage technology shows its age

Now that virtualization has become a staple of enterprise datacenters, however, the SAN and NAS storage architectures have emerged as a significant obstacle to datacenter growth. These legacy storage products are simply not optimized for virtual environments. As multi-vendor systems they are not only difficult to manage and extremely costly to scale, but their underlying network architecture can actually degrade performance as storage demands grow.

Today

Network convergence concept emerges

Today's next generation solutions converge the compute and storage levels so that, datacenters can seamlessly scale. Converged solutions provide a single pane of management so that, storage can be automatically provisioned whenever new virtual machines are deployed. The result is a next generation architecture that delivers streamlined management, massive scalability and dramatically better efficiency and economics.

The Future

Software defined networks hold the key

Welcome to the world of next-generation convergence using software defined network technology. Compute and storage is now software defined, virtualized and pooled. It is built from the ground up for virtualized datacenters. Next generation convergence brings massive scalability without the bottlenecks, complexity and costs of legacy storage networks. It is a bold new vision for the future datacenter and it is here today.