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The state of data center convergence: Past, present and future
This article is part of the Storage issue of November 2020, Vol. 18, No. 4
Data center convergence emerged to address the limitations of traditional infrastructure and storage, with the aim of finding ways to better integrate the discrete components that constitute IT infrastructure. The converged data center has evolved ever since. The data center convergence movement started over a decade ago with the introduction of converged infrastructure (CI), which offered a preconfigured hardware-based offering that streamlined infrastructure deployment and maintenance. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) built on this trend by providing a preconfigured software-based offering that simplified IT operations even further. This was followed by composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI), which combined elements of both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure to deliver greater flexibility and integrated support for automation and orchestration. These three infrastructures -- CI, HCI and CDI -- represent today's primary approaches to data center convergence. The lines between each type are sometimes blurred...
Features in this issue
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Enterprise backup as a service explained
Enterprise BaaS is a software as a service that delivers backup and recovery services that connect systems to the cloud. Learn how BaaS works, pros and cons, and best practices.
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The state of data center convergence: Past, present and future
Discover if CI, HCI, dHCI or composable technology is right for your environment and workloads, and how the converged data center continues to evolve.
News in this issue
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Post-acquisition strategy and why storage mergers go bad
NetApp-SolidFire and HPE-SimpliVity cuts illustrate some of the pitfalls awaiting large vendors when they spend hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on acquisitions.
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Optimal architectures for intelligent storage systems
Explore the best, most optimal architectures for intelligent storage and how these systems improve storage performance/utilization to help get more bang out of your data set buck.
Columns in this issue
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With release of vSphere 7, VMware takes NVMe-oF mainstream
VMware's support of NVMe-oF means organizations might be able to significantly improve the performance of their application environments without changing any data center hardware.
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Lines blur between structured and unstructured data storage
Open source tools like Presto persist low-cost unstructured object data stores while still making information accessible through structured data access tools such as SQL.