Choosing Simple and Good or Complex and Best - Conclusion

(Continued from Part 1) http://www.starshiplewis.com/blog/2015/03/choosing-simple-and-good-or-complex-and-best.html

High-level summary from Part 1: With IT decisions today there are many options.  Some claim Swiss army knife functionality, others do one or a few things very well.  What’s the best way to evaluate these technologies for your modern data center?  Rule 1 – simple and converged, maybe. Rule 2 – don’t use a variable cost model.

Rule 3: It is OK to do both.

I have both an iPhone and a fancy Canon 22 megapixel camera. I probably take ten times more pictures with the iPhone (because it is convenient), but there are still times when I want the best possible picture and will sacrifice convenience for specialized function.

Converged platforms are never going to be able to cover 100% of use cases and there will always be needs for specialized solutions, but it is often better to still use converged platforms where possible and also use specialized products. 

The compelling reasons to look at converged products are simplicity, convenience, and cost. I believe that, within IT, converged solutions are about to take center-stage just as smartphones did five years ago.  Convergence comes in many forms; there are cloud-based SaaS solutions that provide “convergence” by aggregating customers onto a single platform and solutions that integrate server, network, and storage infrastructure.

With our company, Formation Data Systems, our focus is converging data storage resources like flash, disk, and even cloud storage into a single virtual environment that can be used to meet all types of application data storage needs. In this way, a common set of physical resources can be shared to deliver block, file, and object formats with varying performance and reliability metrics. 

While it is fun to own every specialty product, in the end things like cost, and practicality usually win.