In the last few months, I’ve heard several Fortune 100 company CEOs claim that they are software companies first, manufacturers of products second. These CEOs are not from high-tech startups, instead most of them are makers of everyday items like cars and household appliances. They understand it is the data that they can collect from these items that can differentiate them from their global competitors. The problem facing IT is that their infrastructures weren’t designed to support this data set.
The data center and its storage infrastructure are optimized for back office applications. Those applications are what the business runs on, but they are not the applications that are advancing it forward. The key difference is that back office applications support internal processes and users. Next generation applications, often called third platform applications, are external, reaching out of the organization to collect data and elicit real-time feedback from users.
HPC Comes to the Traditional Data Center
A high-performance computing (HPC) environment is an environment that has to process through large chunks of data, as fast as possible, to generate an answer or a prediction. The more data that can be ingested and stored the more accurate the answer can be. The faster that data can be analyzed increases the number of simulations that can be run. The more often a simulation results in the same response the more confident the organization can be in the answer. Speed to ingest, process and store fast amounts of data is critical for success.
The traditional data center today has this same need. It needs to be able to collect data from thousands of points of input (devices, sensors or users), rapidly and store that data cost effectively for potentially a very long time. Then it needs to analyze that data to improve customer satisfaction and future product offerings. It also needs to distribute that data to branch offices, users, clients and partners worldwide.
At the same time, the classic back office applications are not going anywhere. They continue to be critical to an organization and are increasing their need to also process more data and service more users.
The HPC Storage Solution
Since the data center is becoming more HPC-like, it makes sense for IT professionals to explore HPC class storage solutions. These are solutions that can scale to meet both performance and capacity requirements as well as be able to store data for a long time.
Want to learn more about why HPC is so well suited for the traditional data center? Want to learn how to integrate HPC storage into your environment? Attend our webinar, “Five Reasons the Enterprise Needs HPC Technology” today at 1:00 pm Eastern Time and 10:00 am Pacific Time.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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