So in keeping with the theme of Dr. Who quotes for the titles of my posts, I think this is a good topic to discuss.

When I started virtualizing servers, vMotion was still a roadmap item, HA was still a frightening concept that we were only comfortable using in test environments, and iSCSI was not quite ready for the enterprise. At that time, we were convinced there would be no more datacenters built, everything would be virtualized, and we would just buy cheap commodity servers and storage.

In this utopia, hardware companies would become software companies, and all our applications would become more and more advanced, hardware would be built from parts or purchased from the lowest bidder. Interestingly the past few weeks I have had the privilege to meet with a number of my customers in the Enterprise Health Care space. Most of the conversations have been around the Software Defined Data Center, and the concept of driving more value to the business. Many of these customers want to get out of the datacenter business, they don’t want to manage boxes. The challenge for many of them though is getting their applications to come along.

To solve this, many of these types of customers are looking at implementing SDDC solutions, and treating their hardware as a commodity, purchasing servers from the most cost effective source, while storage and networks still seem to come down to the teams preference. As we observe this shift in strategy, it is time for the applications to catch up. Hardware is a dying business, customers need to get out of the business of managing boxes, it is time to shift and realize what matters. Drive value to the business, or become obsolete. We are in a software world, the age of hyper convergence through software.

This is an exciting time, but we have to move with the times. We can no longer be tied to legacy hardware architectures, we must move forward, faster, better stronger, and stop worrying about the box.