Leaving Las Vegas: Observations from the Gartner Data Center Conference
I’m just back from spending last week in Vegas at the Gartner data center conference, and I found two themes really critical to a majority of the tracks:
- The need for bi-modal IT. For more static apps and functions – so-called systems of record – IT needs to operate in Mode 1, the traditional approach of longer planning, diligent governance, and slower timing. But to become a Digital Enterprise, where IT is the business, driving new sources of revenue and engaging directly with the enterprise’s customers, IT needs to also operate in Model 2, to rapidly create systems of innovation. This mode, staff by a different skill set, needs fast development, with appropriate but smaller governance, and rapid innovation of short-lived apps. This mode brings the agility and adaptability – and ultimately competitiveness – that organizations need to differentiate.
- The need for non-stop IT. Disaster recovery is no longer enough – you’ve got to deliver continuous availability. With downtime unacceptable, you need to architect for active/active operations.
These topics are critical for all IT organizations, of course, and it’s super exciting to see the intersection of these ideas with the ScaleArc value prop.
For bi-modal IT, ScaleArc enables organizations to function in Mode 2, getting agility and flexibility out of their database in ways their database vendor can’t. Because we drop in between the apps and the database and provide an abstraction layer between them, organizations get an agile data tier that speeds development, increases flexibility, and – most importantly – improves uptime.
That uptime benefit directly maps to Gartner’s other big IT need – non-stop IT. You need to avoid both planned and unplanned downtime. For all the four 9s or five 9s availability figures that IT touts, those numbers don’t include downtime for maintenance. And the reality is that for many organizations today, the tolerance for outages – even Saturday night at 11 pm – just isn’t there.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see Gartner analysts taking a broader view of the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market, expanding the definition to include database load balancers. Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner called out ScaleArc during his review of the Magic Quadrant on ADCs, including us on a slide showing other providers and verbally calling out our ability to provide these key functions for SQL traffic.
It was also great to talk to the end users on site – those charged with keeping the lights on all the time. I was describing what we do to a colleague sitting next to me during one session, and the guy sitting in front of us turned around asking for ScaleArc product info because his organization needs what we do.
It was a great week reaffirming the value of ScaleArc’s software!
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