My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 11

Chapter 1: Surveying the State of IT for the Enterprise 7 The (hyper)converged revolution of compute and storage Thanks to the rise of flash storage and the commoditization of the compute and storage layers, recent years have seen the tremendous rise of hyperconverged infrastructure. In such an environment, storage and compute — servers — are collapsed into a single unit of infrastructure, effectively eliminating expensive and complex SAN environments. Hyperconverged infrastructure enables organizations to easily manage and scale their datacenter environments. This architectural option has been a boon for many customers because it’s enabled far easier administration of the datacenter and has led to decreased costs and increased end‐user and customer satisfaction. Modern application architectures If you’ve never heard the phrase bimodal IT, here’s a quick rundown for you: IT has dueling priorities these days. First, organizations have a reasonable expectation that IT will continue to support what might be considered “legacy applications.” In reality, such applications likely will continue to be mainstays of the business foundation for the foreseeable future. These hardy survivors include client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, collaboration systems, and local database applications. These applications traditionally have required a conservative approach to maintenance. As mission‐critical applications, they need a rock solid foundation, high availability mechanisms, and a light touch when doing updates, which must be painstakingly planned. The goal is to reduce risk to the business by ensuring that crucial applications are always on. The need to minimize risk to these applications is one of the reasons some IT departments have reputations of being stodgy and unyielding. In fact, the IT group is simply trying to keep the business running. Change makes that a difficult charge. On the flip side of the equation, a new breed of applications is popping up. These innovative application types might exist in These materials are © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.