GITC 2014: Infrastructure ushers in a new era of storage

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"The trend of the world is that after a long period of unity, it will eventually divide, and after a long period of division, it will eventually unite." This is the first sentence in the opening chapter of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the four great masterpieces of my country. From the development and evolution of IT systems, it seems that this sentence can also be used to summarize it, from the initial unity to the differentiation of servers, storage, networks and others. Today, as the trend of convergence becomes more and more obvious, converged infrastructure is also recognized by more and more users. This article will explain in detail the definition of converged infrastructure, mainstream products in the market and the future development trend of convergence.

The rapid popularization of applications such as the big data era, mobile Internet, social networks, data analysis, and cloud services has put forward revolutionary demands on data centers, and storage infrastructure has become one of the core IT. New applications are emerging in various fields such as government, military industry, scientific research institutes, aerospace, large commercial chains, medical care, finance, new media, and radio and television. The value of data is becoming increasingly prominent, and data has become an indispensable asset. As a data carrier and driving force, the storage system has become the most critical core of the big data infrastructure.

Traditional data centers are far from meeting the needs of emerging applications in terms of performance, efficiency, investment returns, and security. Data center businesses urgently need new big data processing centers to support them. In addition to traditional high reliability, high redundancy, and green energy saving, new big data centers must also have a series of features such as virtualization, modularization, elastic expansion, and automation to meet the needs of applications with big data characteristics. These unprecedented demands have brought about drastic changes in the architecture and functions of storage systems.

Based on the needs of big data applications, the concept of "application-defined storage" was proposed. As the core data foundation of the data center, the storage system is no longer just a traditional decentralized, single underlying device. In addition to high performance, high security, and high reliability, it must also have virtualization, parallel distribution, automatic tiering, elastic expansion, heterogeneous resource integration, global cache acceleration, and other features to meet the needs of business applications with big data characteristics.

According to some recent authoritative surveys, half of enterprises have deployed or are deploying converged infrastructure, which includes computing, storage, network and system management resources packaged in an end-to-end solution. The purpose of converged infrastructure is to integrate systems, shorten deployment time, improve resource utilization and reduce costs. Today, converged infrastructure is very popular and is ready to take off in enterprises.

GITC 2014 Global Internet Technology Conference is jointly organized by the organizer Qilin Club and iTech Club (Internet Technology Elite Club), and is committed to creating a professional, open and leading conference and exhibition platform in the Internet field. It will be officially held at the Beijing National Convention Center from October 9th to 10th. The conference is themed "Technology Evolution", focusing on the latest Internet technologies and hot areas, and will conduct ideological collisions and exchanges and discussions, experience the leapfrog development brought by the Internet, and jointly look forward to the future direction of the Internet industry.

The conference will set up a special session on infrastructure: including servers, data storage devices, network equipment and IT infrastructure management, automation and business process software, and integrated infrastructure solutions. At the conference, Internet elites from different industries will share their own business philosophy, summarize industry experience and entrepreneurial experience, and jointly discuss the infrastructure of the Internet era.

Many industry insiders believe that the future of converged infrastructure is open, and now the open source community is developing more and more rapidly, gaining recognition from more and more users, especially some Internet pioneers who have taken the lead in sharing some new open source technology experiences, which have provided guidance and encouragement to many users. Although open source technology is becoming more and more popular, for general users, they usually face such an embarrassment, that is, it is relatively easy to get started with open source technology, but it seems powerless to really develop it in depth to meet the actual business needs. Dynamic converged data center infrastructure will maximize economic benefits and improve application performance. Turning to convergence can bring innovation and growth to create infrastructure solutions. For more infrastructure discussions, see the results at GITC 2014.