We’ve seen the future of business IT and we’re ready to deploy it for our clients. That’s not hyperbole. Anyone who has worked with the Brightworks team knows we’re not given to hype and hysteria. But we believe we’re at the beginning of a development that will have as big an impact on how companies handle IT as the introduction of cloud computing.
For years, companies have used software-defined data centers as a faster, more efficient way to store and access data. The basic idea behind software-defined concepts is that the configuration of infrastructure can be completely handled through methodologies rooted in software development.
Now that same concept is being leveraged on a broader scale through what’s come to be known as Software-Defined Everything (SDE). That term describes an environment using virtualization and software-defined data centers in which administrators can construct, configure, manage, modify, and replicate entire systems solely through software.
If that sounds a bit confusing, consider this practical example: over a decade ago, I helped a major healthcare organization relocate its data center into a new location. Even though much of the system had been virtualized, the move involved working with 22 racks of physical equipment and took an entire year to accomplish. Now, with SDE, everything is housed in the cloud. I can literally replicate the entire data center with a click of a mouse. There’s no need to physically move anything because all the elements are cloud-based.
Think that sounds like science fiction? Think again. Brightworks has partnered with a company called Verge that has developed an operating system that virtualizes every element of the entire data center — including network, compute (hypervisor), storage, nested multi-tenancy tenancy, backup, and disaster recovery — into a single unified and integrated system that runs beautifully on commodity hardware. Verge-OS connects and pools all of the system’s raw resources and presents them as a core virtual data center. From that, virtual resources can be provisioned to create self-contained, tenant virtual datacenters, each completely isolated and secure.
The beauty of Verge is that it simplifies your company’s entire IT infrastructure into a single unified system that delivers bare metal-like performance while reducing capital expenditures and operational costs. It’s also a highly secure approach, with encryption and cryptographic hashes similar to blockchain technology, ensuring data integrity, and replicating data centers to allow users to bring secondary locations online instantly if a primary location goes down. It’s completely scalable and portable, too. And for companies that are focused on sustainability, scaling the system with software instead of energy-consuming physical data centers dramatically reduces the carbon footprint along with capital costs.
We’re excited about Verge and will share more about its capabilities in the coming weeks. As a Verge partner, we’ll be among the first to deploy this extraordinary technology, giving our clients greater flexibility and performance while keeping our services affordable. It’s just one more example of the benefits of co-managed IT.