webscale

I think a better term might be "Comp-Sci PHD IT"

⚔️⚔️⚔️ kyaaS⚔️⚔️⚔️

apparently, a standards body has to legitimize the term for infrastructure... with a sacrifice or an equivalent exchange :-)

@mappingbabel enterprise won't have PhDs (and I questions how many coders) - are the PhDs building solutions that can be standardized? Enterprise has different scale (distributed is useful for many reasons).

if something requires a PHD to do..we have failed as companies.

@KongYang Yes. I do think clarifying what this term means for enterprise is worthwhile though - if only to avoid the future FUD.

@stu exactly..most end users aren't PHD people. they care about making apps for their clients..this means infrastructure should cater to app needs without requiring constant configuration. @cohodata #webscale

@avemii Point I'm making is a lot of webscale tech is actively developed by some internal PHDs. Making it consumable can be quite difficult. Companies do have a role here, but it's a tough one.

@stu If #webscale is about scale-out dist., sw-centric, shared-nothing architectures, then v. much legitimate. No point nitpicking w narrow definitions of terms. The key qn is what the problems are and how to get past them.

Steve Kaplan

The whole idea of web-scale converged infrastructure is to provide #webscale without the PhDs.

@mappingbabel agree..we have alot of PHDs working on these issues. But we are cognoscenti of making sure its consumable without requiring constant config for the end user. @cohodata #webscale

@avemii what does the IT job of the (near) future look like? what goes away and what new things must they learn/do?

Yes! Though stuff like easy multi-DC replication/load balancing/DB management is so tricky I think lots of enterprises are having to hire some sophisticated&expensive people to manage it.

Steve Kaplan

Storage administrators need to become more diverse. The days of LUN carving & fibre channel zoning are coming to an end

@stu @avemii Familiarity with cluster management systems & knowledge of IO will always be important, but IT will have to do less fiddly stuff.

@mappingbabel are we hiding/abstracting the problems (if things go wrong, we are in trouble) - or are we creating SIMPLE solutions that can be managed easily and fixed/upgraded easily?

I think due to virtualization and making infrastructure app aware. The typical IT person will have to know the entire stack not just their area (networking,storage, apps).

Yes! Storage is on the cusp of a pretty major usability/maintenance/management change. (Networking maybe in five years, I reckon).

agree..key will be understanding what your applications requirements are..to make sure you deliver value to your end users (from an IT persons view) @cohodata #webscale

@mappingbabel This could be based on type of infrastructure you chose for the app, as #webscale isn't entire just virtual can be for non virtualized apps. As those are the most performance and maintenance hungry. @cohodata

@stu If your business is IT, go ahead, hire a team of PhDs and get to work. It makes sense. If you're a retailer or a hospital, then no. But "#webscale inside" is on the rise. Products that look like trad. infra but behave like webscale architecturally.

@stu it's about automating issue detection and resolution, creating self-healing systems that are easy to manage. Automation at all levels is key to simplification.

Jack Clark13

Is "webscale IT" an actual design philosophy or a bunch of technologies that have been glued together by startups?

3 Votes Vote

1. It's an operational philosophy; 2. There are technologies that web-scale companies are doing; 3. Enterprise IT will NOT end up looking the same (scale and app mix different). What do others think?

@bacon_is_king care to chime in?

unless there is a true benefit to doing so, Ent IT will not adopt. Re-writing 99% of their apps is not an option. Ent apps today dont take advantage of webscale properties.

@Bacon_Is_King what level of redesign is required for a typical enterprise app to make use of some kind of PAYG IT infrastructure, though?

Twitter uses webscale because they need to, and because they are on the "Web", standard Ent e-Biz suites cant integrate into a webscale design, the apps have no awarness of those properties.

@Bacon_Is_King - you're spot on. Thats exactly why Nutanix tries to let the enterprise run existing apps, but makes the rest of the architecture webscale (using VMs)

@Bacon_Is_King taking advantage of the webscale properties is what the app needs to do to leverage them, its not a philosophy of operations, its about the ability to merge the app, with the resiliency of webscale design.

Technologies embody the philosophies and architectures (e.g., scale-out, resilient, flat arch, etc.).

⚔️⚔️⚔️ kyaaS⚔️⚔️⚔️

webscale is a services delivery & consumption philosophy.

@Bacon_Is_King Waiting for apps to become scale-out, distributed, etc. is neither an option nor required. Ent. apps should be able to use web-scale infra without needing rewriting or arch.

@sudasrinivasan only if your view of webscale is limited simply to the underlying infrastructure and not the ability of the apps to have awareness and leverage that infrastructure for resiliency, scale, etc.

@Bacon_Is_King @sudasrinivasan how does an app get awareness in the first place? Isn't the key instrumentation & perf telemetry - how do you accomplish this for the enterprise?

that actually happens by leveraging app context (assigned by the app admin). As entire infrastructure should cater to app

once the infrastructure knows the profile of the app you it can cater to it. This allows #webscale on demand of performance/bottlenecks etc. @cohodata

Stuart Miniman11

The Dell Nutanix deal http://siliconangle....
What Qs or comments do people have?

Dell takes another shot at convergence market with Nutanix alliance | SiliconANGLE
Hot on the heels of arch-rival Hewlett-Packard’s unveiling of a slew of new enterprise and supercomputing systems at its annual Discover conference earlier this month, Dell has upped the ante with its own fresh batch of data center products.

3 Votes Vote

Petri Rantanen

As Nutanix partner this puzzling. Not sure how Dell work with partners.

@petrirantanen the channel is critical to this being successful - Nutanix is making sure not to damage relationships or give an OEM an unfair advantage and Dell wants to give partners what they need to succeed

@petrirantanen also see http://www.nutanix.c... from @roidude

Implications of the Dell OEM Relationship for Nutanix Channel Partners | Nutanix
In the technology industry, OEM means that a manufacturer purchases a product at a deep discount with carte blanche to package and sell it as desired. Nutanix, consistent with our corporate DNA for breaking the rules, is also changing the OEM game. W...

@petrirantanen @stu agreed - infra hardware companies must work with the channel unless they are vending basic commodity stuff.

John Furrier

@mappingbabel Sam is cool exec Dell is lucky to have him

Nikita Maheshwari

@petrirantanen Did that post help clarify? If not - Email us directly and we can have a live convo with you. Will DM you my email.

Jack Clark10

So @avemii says webscale is an actual design philosophy - you make storage deform around apps. Fairly sensible.

Does this make things like VMware (abstracting the app from the infra) less relevant?

More context please

which webscale companies are even using a hypervisor today?

@posix4e the idea seems to be that you automatically tier and place storage according to needs of app without having to know much about it.

@Bacon_Is_King Most use containers internally, but serve up hyporvisors for untrusted users. Amazon: Xen. Google: Linux Containers with KVM on top (Compute Engine).

whats old is new again.

Petri Rantanen

@mappingbabe Hypervisors still needed in enterprises, over 1k win apps + linux apps.

@stu - actually still relevant. VMWare abstracts the app from CPU and memory. Storage virtualization (storage density of machines, storage tiers based on performance - flash, disk, etc) is another piece.

exactly, focus = giving resources to applications without having to lift a finger. Do this by giving context to applications via app level.

Alex Newman

"the idea seems to be that you automatically tier and place storage" - That will only work for applications with trivial storage requirements. It's easier to move the code than the data.

@petrirantanen @Bacon_Is_King agreed - press has got carried away and sees containerization as a solution to all woes. It's not.

@posix4e - depends on whose code it is. If the infrastructure supports moving the data, there is no need to move code. In any case, I feel this works more for application with complex requirements rather than simple ones.

@karthikr @posix4e I have a feeling that application complexity is only going to grow over time. Is there evidence to the contrary?

@posix4e - simple principles like storing cold data (archival data) in cheaper tiers and hot data (cache hits, etc) in high performance tiers is universal. The idea is to expand on this.

- it will become more complex, no doubt. The more stable infra you provide, the more the applications will evolve and push it.

Alex Newman

Hmm i feel like for large amounts of data, moving it is going to only grow in expense. SATA controllers are getting faster than network controllers are.

Alex Newman

@karthikr For instance SATA revision 3.2, is something like 16 gbps. Expect even desktops to have 2 of these. Servers more like 6. When do we expect 100gbps in the datacenter?