Old Tech, New Name?

The marketing machines of today often paint new technologies to suggest they’re the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes though, the new products are just a rehash of an existing technology. In this blog post, I’ll look at some of these. As some of you may know, my tech background is heavily focused around virtualization and the associated hardware and software products. With this in mind, this post will have a slant towards those types of products. One of the recent technology trends I have seen cropping up is something called dHCI or disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure. I mean, what is that? If you break down to its core components, it’s nothing more than separate switching, compute, and storage. Why is this so familiar? Oh yeah—it’s called converged infrastructure. There’s nothing HCI about it. HCI is the convergence of storage and compute on to a single chassis. To me, it’s like going to a hipster café and asking for a hyperconverged sandwich. You expect a ready-to-eat, turnkey sandwich but instead, you receive a disassembled sandwich you have to construct yourself and then somehow it’s better than the thing it was trying to be in the first place: a sandwich. No thanks. If you dig a little deeper, the secret sauce to dHCI is the lifecycle management software overlaying the converged infrastructure but hey, not everyone wants secret sauce with their sandwich. If you take this a step further and label these types of components as cloud computing, nothing has really changed. One could argue true cloud computing is the ability to self-provision workloads, but rarely does a product labeled as cloud computing deliver those results, especially private clouds. An interesting term I came across as a future technology trend is distributed cloud.¹ This sounds an awful lot like hybrid cloud to me. Distributed cloud is when public cloud service offerings are moved into private data centers on dedicated hardware to give a public cloud-like experience locally. One could argue this already happens the other way around with a hybrid cloud. Technologies like VMware on AWS (or any public cloud for that matter) make this happen today. What about containers? Containers have held the media’s attention for the last few years now as a new way to package and deliver a standardized application portable across environments. The concept of containers isn’t new, though. Docker arguably brought containers to the masses but if you look at this excellent article by Ell Marquez on the history of containers, we can see its roots go all the way back to the mainframe era of the late 70s and 80s. The terminology used by data protection companies to describe their products also grinds my gears. Selling technology on being immutable. Immutable meaning it cannot be changed once it has been committed to media. Err, WORM media anyone? This technology has existed for years on tape and hard drives. Don’t try and sell it as a new thing. While this may seem a bit ranty, if you’re in the industry, you can probably guess which companies I’m referring to with my remarks. What I am hoping to highlight though is not everything is new and shiny, some of it is wrapped up in hype or clever marketing. ¹Source: CRN https://www.crn.com/slide-shows/virtualization/gartner-s-top-10-technology-trends-for-2020-that-will-shape-the-future/9