David Weinstein Email & Phone Number

CDI is now part of AHEAD, a leading provider of platforms for digital business. My current position at AHEAD is a Senior Client Solutions Engineer where my responsibilities and expertise continue in engineering platforms in storage, server, backup recovery, and converged and hyperconverged solutions architecture.In my opinion, when we take a look at the latest offerings and industry predictions regarding both server and storage architectures today, we see a cyclical pattern occurring back and forth between consolidated and distributed approaches for both servers and storage.If we take a historic look at server architectures, we see centralized computing on a monolithic mainframe platform, running multiple virtual instances on a centralized set of compute resources.From there, we saw a shift to a more distributed approach to a client server distributed model, where resources were distributed to isolate workloads and add high availability and independent scale.Then primarily due to datacenter sprawl, lack of manageability and increased environmental costs, we saw a shift back to a consolidated approach using hypervisors which manage virtual servers on a centralized physical set of one or more servers in a cluster. This extended itself today to a hyperconverged model, which also accounts for software defined networking and storage.This cyclical effect on server platform architectures creates confusion for most consumers. Which is it? Do we centralize our computing or do we distribute it? Or is it a combination of both?The same cyclical effect has occurred regarding storage platforms as well. Originally data was stored on either internal disk technology or direct attached, which was not-shareable and was dedicated to just one server.The need to share data across the network turned this direct attached approach into a network attached shareable model where the storage was accessible by one or more servers on the same network. This additional network traffic caused congestion which forced the advent of a dedicated storage area network to isolate the traffic.Today, as bandwidth has increased, there are considerations to consolidate that isolated traffic back onto the primary network by encapsulating the storage protocols over the network protocols.Once again, we see a cyclical occurrence within the industry from decentralized to centralized. The public cloud adds a whole other dynamic to expand that cyclical pattern. What an exciting, ever-changing, ever-advancing, technological world we live in!