A perennial challenge in the information technology (IT) industry is how to create the most efficient IT infrastructure while continuing to meet evolving performance, availability, manageability, and cost goals. Over the past decade, vendors and customers alike have been experimenting with software-defined shared nothing infrastructures that promised simpler deployment, expansion, and management, but what has become increasingly clear in the past several years is that these types of systems pose significant challenges when customers try to operate them at scale. As vendors and customers look to deploy the types of IT infrastructure they need to meet the requirements of the digital era, there has been a marked move back toward more disaggregated architectures. The hyperscalers — providers such as Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft that led the original experiment with shared nothing designs in large-scale web infrastructure — have been very public about their moves back toward disaggregated designs.
IDC Technology Spotlight: VAST Data
