The scalability and dynamism of the cloud, has traditional data centers on the ropes, right? If you had seen Liqid at Gestalt IT’s recent AI Field Day or Micron and Xilinx at the latest Tech FieldDay, the answer is “nope”. By defining infrastructure operations through software — much like how the cloud does — and building it on top of faster, more capable hardware, data centers can act at the speed of business, saving them from being outdated and outmatched by cloud-based infrastructure.
Here's a quick recap of a great conversation with GestaltIT’s Stephen Foskett during a recent On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast.
For the last 15+ years, organizations have been using software virtualization to make their host servers easier to provision, scale, and manage (or just migrated to the cloud). However, underneath all that software are the same static servers that existed for decades before virtualization, that take forever to deploy, are difficult to scale, and have terrible resource utilization.
Software composability allows the creation bare metal host servers that can meet any workload need both on-prem and at the edge, in seconds. There is a huge opportunity with AI workloads, where they all require something a little bit different in terms of resources and processing power. With composability organizations can deploy previously impossible server configurations without worrying about being confined by traditional infrastructure limitations (i.e. 1U server with 16 GPU).
Composable infrastructure enables the movement of infrastructure at the speed of business. Business needs change so quickly that expensive hardware recently purchased might become outdated more quickly than anticipated. The ease of adjusting a composable environment is way more attractive than building a whole new bare metal environment. Just swap-out server components with software, completely hands-free.
The only constant in IT is constant change.
To have an environment like composable infrastructure that can change with the business instead of fighting it tooth and nail is a game changer. While the public cloud is great for public resources, for high powered use cases, composability on premises is the best bet. Executing HPC workloads in a cloud environment is ultimately costly and doesn’t provide the same level of security that private data centers allow.
Composability is the future of the modern datacenter. Since business is always changing, dynamic environments like hosting providers, enterprises experiencing lots of growth, and businesses with lots of large sets of data moving around quickly are the ideal consumers of composable infrastructure.
The cloud isn’t going away, but composability is the great equalizer.
To watch the full On-Premise IT Roundtable Podcast on YouTube, click here.
