Arthur Cole

The cloud is quickly expanding from a general-purpose data services platform to a series of highly targeted industry vertical solutions, further decreasing the need for businesses of all types to maintain infrastructure to support their operational models. This is proving to be a crucial niche for smaller cloud players, and even software developers incorporating cloud […]

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is typically thought of as a web-scale data center solution. But it turns out that the technology’s space and management advantages are making it equally compelling for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Everyone has a vested interest in streamlining their data infrastructure, but for SMBs, the need is even greater because they […]

The data center is on a clear trajectory toward greater abstraction, greater resource distribution, and greater diversity in both the workloads it supports and the technologies it brings to bear. All of this leads to an increasingly complex management challenge that pits the need for greater autonomy among users and applications against the needs of […]

The software-defined data center (SDDC) is on the minds of many enterprise executives these days, but aside from the broad outlines of a fully virtualized infrastructure, there is little in the way of a clear direction as to how it should be architected or what operational parameters it should support. One thing is certain, however: […]

One of the overarching themes surrounding digital transformation is the need to get infrastructure out of the way of data and application productivity. Whether the mechanism is automation, devops or cloud computing, the idea is to give users greater control over both their data and the tools needed to make use of it. A key […]

Amid all the tension that surrounds IT automation these days, it could very well turn out that by the end of the decade, 2017 will seem like the calm before the storm. While many leading organizations are already touting their use of automation in complex data environments, it’s fair to say that the rollout of […]

Server infrastructure is shrinking in the enterprise. This makes a lot of sense because as more workloads are pushed to the cloud, the need for local resources is diminishing. But it is also a facet of the increased utilization that organizations strive to maintain in the data center, achieved largely by increasing the density of […]

Does devops lead to agile, or does agile lead to devops? Or perhaps they move in tandem as the enterprise gropes its way through digital transition. And if that’s the case, is optimized, automated infrastructure the cause or the effect of this new IT model? The answers to these questions could be crucial for the […]

The enterprise seems content to build and maintain local data infrastructure despite the cost and flexibility benefits that exist on the public cloud, but that does not mean they will continue with the complex, silo-laden data centers of today. Instead, new modular solutions are entering the channel that promise to streamline both the deployment and […]

Enterprises that wade into hybrid cloud infrastructure quickly come to a startling reality: Virtualization and hardware abstraction do not eliminate data silos all by themselves. In fact, many organizations are finding that the integration challenges in the cloud are even greater than in the data center, if only because cloud infrastructure is expected to support […]

In the era of Big Data, the enterprise will have to embrace Big Computing in one form or another. But exactly how this is to be done at a reasonable price point and with reasonable simplicity is still an open question, as is whether the knowledge to be gleaned from all this number crunching will […]

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is quickly infiltrating enterprise capital spending plans, which is naturally leading to increased competition among vendors who have seen their hardware revenues diminish steadily over the past decade. And while it is too soon to start calling it a “war” akin to the PC, server, storage and cloud wars of the past, […]