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5 Big Disaster Recovery Myths
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IT Project: Virtualisation
Virtualisation, in all its forms, has dramatically changed the way enterprise datacentres are operated, managed and built over the course of the past decade or so.
From a server point of view, virtualisation has allowed datacentre operators to improve the efficiency of their facilities, while allowing them to reduce the amount of physical space the hardware inside them takes up.
With analyst reports suggesting the server virtualisation market has reached saturation point, enterprises are now looking to network function virtualisation to help deal with the growing number of endpoint devices connecting to their networks.
The desktop virtualisation market, meanwhile, continues to go from strength-to-strength, as the product portfolios of the major suppliers continue to mature, paving the way for a much-improved end user experience.
In this IT Project report, we take a closer a look at some of these trends, and share real-world examples and case studies of organisations that are benefiting from them.
These are also closely related to: "5 Big Disaster Recovery Myths"
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How the application integration landscape is changing
For many years, the industry has strived to make it possible to link applications together in a way that enables them to share resources. Technologies like Distributed Computing and the Common Object Model (Com) have been honed, pared back and refined into web services, the so-called service-oriented architecture and now, composable applications and microservices.
Composable applications is the idea that the functional blocks of an application can be decoupled from the complete applications. These individual component parts can then be more finely tuned to create a new application that once reintegrated, is ideologically, if not also functionally, greater than the sum of its parts.
Unlike commercial off the shelf (or COTS) products, that comprise of packaged software which offer a set of built-in features, composable applications are not predefined. Instead, packaged software represents granular and modular component blocks that can be brought together in the always-on world of web and cloud to form what effectively represents an entirely new technology proposition in every use case
A modern applications architecture comprises of an elastic microservices architecture, which offers advantages like better performance, scalability and fault isolation along with minimising application downtime.
Microservices provide building blocks on which composable applications can be built. But unlike its predecessors, tend to run on bare metal hardware or on virtualised servers, a microservice runs in a container, which is both lightweight and portable. Using a container means the microservice can be hosted on-premise or in the public cloud.
While it makes total sense for businesses to strive for cloud-native application development, where applications are engineered for a cloud-only infrastructure, the reality is that not every workload is suitable for the cloud.
It is therefore necessary to consider how application integration works when the microservices needed span public and private cloud infrastructure.
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It's hyper converged-with-everything in today's datacentre
Hyper-converged infrastructure has taken the datacentre by storm.
At heart it is the marrying of compute and storage in one box, but with a couple of crucial additions.
These are the ability to combine multiple nodes into a single cluster, with resources shared in grid-like fashion between them. And, at the same time, that is usually accompanied by a built-in virtualisation hypervisor.
Those characteristics make hyper-converged infrastructure simple to roll out and manage, and well-suited to use cases that range from SME deployments to multiple-node enterprise implementations.
In fact, it's almost a case of "We're all hyper-converged now", as the datacentre-in-a-box threatens to eclipse the shared storage array.
In this e-guide we look at the key hyper-converged vendors and their products, as well as hyper-converged tailored to disaster recovery, backup, cloud functionality, and the software-defined hyper-converged products available.
