Backup, Virtualization, and the Next Big Thing: Keep Calm and Virtualize Everything

What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?  Make me one with everything.

I think of this joke every time someone tells me that they have a single answer to a complex problem.  Unfortunately, there are few such “silver bullet” answers in real life.  Virtualization, however, has been an enormous boon to many of the issues facing IT staff.  Virtualization enables increased productivity via homogenization (basically putting everything into an identical buckets) which makes automation and certain aspects of agility easier.

What’s the problem?  Well, the core problem for the IT staff ends up being the same issue that faced Henry Ford – while offering only black cars (or only certain types of virtual machines)  increases efficiency, there are a whole lot of buyers who want to be able to “have it their way.”  The conflict between automation and adaptability/agility is one that can’t be 100% resolved by a single technology.  This is not only because of the increasing “democratization of IT” and “Bring Your Own Device” movements by users but also because technology changes rapidly in ways that are difficult to predict and are not only evolutionary but disruptive.

In the remainder of this series of posts, we’ll discuss just a few use cases and technologies that IT professionals building out their next generation data centers today need to consider.

This is part 9 of an on-going series. Part 1: virtualization isn’t the next big thing (NBT) because it was the last big thing (LBT); part 2: data center IP traffic growth; part 3: data center IP traffic sources; part 4: cloud workloads; part 5: large data centers and administrator to server ratios; part 6: strategy overview – adapt or be crushed; part 7: automation, agility, adaptability;  part 8, automation vs agility and adaptability.