My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 33

Chapter 3: What Is an Enterprise Cloud?

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management infrastructure for single components, such as
virtualization? If you do, you’re building management silos
and should reevaluate how you’re moving forward.

Machine intelligence
Although the 1980’s film The Terminator foretold the rise of
the artificial intelligence SkyNet, humanity did not heed the
warning and we’re plowing ahead with efforts to turn decision‐
making over to robots and other technology‐based constructs.
That said, never fear! What’s the worst that could happen?
Seriously, though, we’ve come a long way with machine learning tools. Humans now can program systems that actively
learn about their environment and can help administrators
automate many mundane, yet critical, datacenter operations.
With the tools at our disposal, we can implement machine
intelligence and self‐learning capabilities to drive end‐to‐end
automation where the platform becomes smarter with decision making and recommendations over time.
Imagine a world in which you walk into the datacenter and
find half of your nodes burned out, but you didn’t even know
because your management layer shifted those workloads to
operational nodes. Or, imagine a scenario in which your management layer can sense that your web tier is hitting a capacity ceiling, and it automatically spins up an additional node to
handle overload.
That kind of capability is here today.
In other words, you gain seamless infrastructure optimization
and error remediation as part of a tight control system.

Consumer focus
Today’s consumer electronics have plummeted in cost while
growing in capabilities. Even better, they have become dead
simple to use. Until recent years, enterprise hardware and
software was just the opposite. You practically needed a PhD
in storage to manage lots of arrays. You needed years upon
years of background to even understand what you were clicking. Even worse, IT pros demanded increasing numbers of
what have become known as “nerd knobs,” an unfortunate
term, but one somewhat grounded in reality.

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