Now that I've had the opportunity to step away from a traditional VAR organization I've had the opportunity to open my eyes to niche and bleeding edge technologies. There was a Gartner survey, shocking right, about where most organizations think future strategies and technologies will evolve from. What was surprising about this was most technology executives feel that the traditional players; IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, etc. are in a disadvantages position to compete in a more agile, cloud based, software defined world.
I was surprised to find that there's a bold new technology world out there that helps organizations shift away from puppies towards cattle and ultimately nats. Be honest, how many of you read that twice and are wondering what the hell I'm talking about?
Puppies, everybody loves puppies. In most organizations servers are like puppies. Think about it they all have names, their individual quirks, their expensive when the need to go the vet, everybody panics when something happens to it, and you regularly have to feed and care for it. This model is proving to be expensive, lack scalability, and site awareness just to name a few.
Cattle, can be a harsh example unless you have experience farming. Imagine if your servers where like cattle. Some live, some die, you take some to make burgers. New cattle shows up as fast or faster than old cattle goes out. When things happen it's just how the business works. You still have dairy cows and beef cows but overall management is significantly simplified.
Nats, those things are everywhere and maintain no specific role or use case. The spin up when you need them and the spin down when the don't. This represents an extreme example that is fairly rare outside of the Web 2.0 world.
So anyways...
Here is some cool stuff to check out.
www.nutanix.com
www.exablox.com
