Using Leading-edge Building Blocks to Deploy Scale-out Data Infrastructure

Every datacenter includes a set of software and hardware infrastructure building blocks assembled to provide data storage, processing, and networking resources to a set of application workloads. New types of workloads, and new Commercial Off-The-Shelf infrastructure building blocks, are being developed at an increasing rate.

These building blocks include a new generation of infrastructure software that can pool and provision hardware resources dynamically, via automation driven by policy and analytics, across a constantly changing and heterogeneous workload mix, at datacenter scale. This enables radical improvements in efficiency and effectiveness of hardware resource usage.

Using technical (not marketing) language, and without naming specific products, this presentation covers key storage-related architectural choices and practical considerations for deploying scale-out data infrastructure using the most advanced COTS building blocks.

Learning Objectives

Storage-infrastructure evolution: incrementally adding capacity, performance, successive hardware generations
Options for bringing processing closer to data
Options for integrating multiple storage services (e.g., object, file, block)