The big Internet companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Facebook are having a profound impact on the IT ecosystem. Wikibon has been tracking the hyperscale infrastructure developments for the past few years (see much of this at Wikibon.com/SLI – our Software-led Infrastructure page) and how both the operational models and technologies used are impacting service providers and enterprise environments. The hyperscale (or web-scale) companies still only make up about 20% of IT revenue, but more signifiantly, most of the growth (see server revenue as a barometer of this activity). There are significant differences between the applications in hyperscale (custom written to optimize for massive scale) and enterprise (typically off-the shelf), so the theme is not that the enterprise of tomorrow will look like the web companies of today.
Here is the slide deck that I presented at Web-scale Wednesday, an event to discuss bringing web-scale software and solutions to enterprise IT including a brief discussion of Server SAN:
Other presenters at the webinar included Nutanix (who hosted the event), Twitter, Datastax, CFEngine, Dell, Citrix and Veeam. Jack Clark from The Register and I hosted a CrowdChat (transcript below) where the value and validity of the thesis of webscale IT was debated. The top conversations were on the definition of the category, the importance of infrastructure and the recent announcement of Dell OEMing Nutanix software. Participants want to see more definitional clarity and customer proof points.
