Software is eating the world. Welcome to the world of flat infrastructure.

1. The Politics of Convergence
Dheeraj Pandey, Founder and CEO

2. 2
Everything virtual… and in software
Networking
Storage
Servers
VXLAN
10GbE & SDN
IP Addresses
HBA
Server-side Flash
Trunking
DNS
LACP
Containers
Fiber Channel
OSPF
z/OS
IPMI
LOM
iLO
VT-x
x86
DAS
iSCSI
NFS
FCoE
SMB
Datastores
SAN
NAS
LUNs
RAID
Zoning
Divergence, in the last 15 Years
3 advances challenge storage arrays at their very core
Masking
Blade Chassis
Backplane
P-Series
LPARs

3. 3
Converged Web-Scale Datacenters
Blade servers are passé, rackmounts are in!
Business
Agility
Rapid
Scale
Cost
Design Goals
Efficiency
•No single point of failure
•No single point of bottleneck
• Always-on systems
• Deep Analytics across all SW/HW components
• Interactive visualization of entire datacenters
Fundamental Assumptions
•Unbranded x86 servers: fail-fast systems
•No special purpose appliances
• All intelligence and services in software
• Linear, predictable scale-out

4. 4
“Breaking Away”
Convergence in web-scale datacenters: Challenging the status quo
Flattening of
Infrastructure
Agility in
decision-making

5. 5
Flattening of Infrastructure
How web-scale datacenters achieved convergence
Storage Software
on standard x86
servers
Networking was
the biggest enemy

6. 6
Flattening of Infrastructure
How web-scale datacenters achieved convergence
Data warehousing
using standard x86
rack-mounts
SQL gave way to
REST/HTTP

7. 7
Flattening of Infrastructure
“It’s not happening in my enterprise datacenter”… really?
Big Data
Dev Ops
Public Cloud

8. 8
Flattening of Infrastructure
Big Data Folks: “What in the world is a SAN… and a blade server?!”
“The practitioners of big data are hostile to shared storage. They
prefer server-attached storage… The perception of SAN and
NAS is that they are slow, complex, and above all, expensive.
These qualities are not consistent with big data analytic systems
that thrive on system performance, commodity infrastructure, and
low cost.”
- Wikipedia (“Big Data”)

9. 9
Flattening of Infrastructure
Dev Ops: “What in the world is a blade server?!”
Massive
democratization of
infrastructure
Dev Ops takes charge:
autonomy,
independence, access
Application
owners become
paramount

10. 10
Flattening of Infrastructure
A brief history of the Post-SAN-Post-Blade-Server Converged era
Monolithic mainframe-like
systems were
banned
Grow-as-you-go
clusters are in vogue
Network topologies
have been flattened

11. 11
11
True Convergence
From “Duct Taped” hardware to software-based convergence

12. 12
With software, scale-out,
not scale-up
Convergence 1.0 to 2.0
From “Duct Taped” hardware to true (hyper)convergence

13. 13
True Convergence
Reducing space, power, complexity, and cost

14. 14
True Convergence
The rack-mount (x86) server is the “true north”

15. 15
True Convergence
Web-scale lessons define the “true north”

16. 16
Convergence’s True North