Backup, Virtualization, and the Next Big Thing: Overview

Preface: Greg Shields recently hosted a webinar for 600+ registered webinar attendees for a fireside chat in which I was the invited speaker.  We talked about a variety of topics – from agility, automation, and adaptability to virtualization and software-defined data centers – from containers and Dockers to the internet of things.  What I’m going to do is to use that webinar as the foundation for a series of blog posts in which I create a visual narrative of this theme of next generation data center design.

One thing that Greg stressed in the webinar is that virtualization isn’t the next big thing (NBT) because it was the last big thing (LBT) – virtualization is our foundation – it’s what everything we do now now based upon – even when we don’t use it as in the case of bare metal servers and clouds or when we use alternative forms such as containers.  That brilliantly summed up an important point about what I think of as the agile, automated, adaptive data center – that virtualization is the foundation – but that if your planning for your data center and the backup of that data center focuses only on virtualization, you’re going to be in trouble.  I thought it was a brilliant characterization that if you don’t select technologies that are inherently adaptable, you’re in trouble.

In part 1 of this series, what I’m simply going to layout the overview and agenda for this series:

  • Trends
    • Data Center IP Traffic Growth
    • Data Center IP Traffic Sources
    • Data Center Virtualization
    • Large Data Centers in2014
  • Next Generation Data Center and Cloud Strategies
    • Overview
    • Agile, Automated, Adaptive
    • Bare Metal Cloud (Physical Servers)
    • Containers
    • HDx and SDx – Software Defined Everything
    • Internet of Things

So here we go.  I really hope this is as fun to read as it was to write.  And as always, I’d love to hear from you concerning any thoughts you have on these topics.

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