The current trend of data centres filled with thousands of physical servers and virtual machines needs to change as floor space and power demands grow, according to VCE Asia Pacific and Japan CTO Matt Oostveen.
Speaking at a briefing in Sydney, Oostveen said that when he walks into a data centre today, it is not uncommon to see customers that have thousands of physical servers.
“Sitting on top of that, I’m seeing thousands of VMs. Within the next three years we are going to see environments where we have half a million VMs sitting on top of these enormous stacks. What I have learned is that the current architectures that we use to manage and operate our data centres are starting to lose fidelity,” he said.
To solve the issue, the architecture of data centre needs to be approached differently.
“The data centre of the future needs to be application-defined and software-centric. It needs to be far more linked between the application layer and the infrastructure/facilities layer. We can do this through management and clever operations,” said Oostveen.
He added that data centre operators in Australia are dealing with two issues: The amount of floor space and amount of megawatts that can be provided into the data centre.
“Some of these state-of-the art facilities are fine for floor space capacity but they are starting to reach these limits when it comes to the amount of power that can be provided. We need to make sure that the infrastructure we put in a data centre works within these constraints that our customers are dealing with,” he said.
Oostveen also discussed VCE’s new offerings which have been added to its converged infrastructure portfolio.
Vscale Architecture can be used to connect several converged infrastructure systems and data centre hardware. This provides on-demand, resource sharing.
VCE also launched a converged infrastructure system called VxBlock. The first VxBlock System offers Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure or VMware NSX software to customers.
VMware NSX is a virtual networking and security software product family. In addition, the systems feature Cisco networking, EMC storage and data protection and VMware virtualization.
VCE will be introducing more VxBlock systems throughout 2015, said Oostveen.
The last announcement was an update to the vendor’s converged infrastructure management software, VCE Vision. Version three of the software has been expanded to help IT managers keep track of multiple VCE converged infrastructure systems.
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