The ephemeral composable stack - Synology: Data's 'move' to distributed intelligence

Composable IT is increasingly being discussed across the industry, but the adoption and implementation at enterprise level can be challenging even for the best. This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Nicole Lin in her capacity as managing director of Synology UK – Lin is a multi-lingual tech professional specialising in cloud and data storage infrastructure, with 10-years’ experience in product management and business expansion working across EMEA.

Lin writes as follows..

It is no secret that cloud technology brings its own set of challenges for CEO’s and business owners alike, yet despite these challenges we cannot deny the ‘beauty’ of the cloud model. In terms of its absolute ease, agility, scalability and efficiency in relation to deployment of services, cloud technology stands out from the crowd. This is especially true when it comes to composable applications and microservices, in fact here the public cloud is born ready for them.

On the other hand, at enterprise level large organisations are increasingly under pressure to realise the same level of agility and resource efficiency on-premise for many reasons. Cost is typically a primary reason, but so too is latency, data privacy, autonomy, and regulatory compliance.

Whilst there are composable IT solutions at the ready which promise to address the above, building your own composable IT architecture is no mean feat. Organisations, for example, may find themselves purchasinag another set of ‘siloed’ hardware – remember those HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) devices – which defeats the purpose of cutting down on hefty capital expenditure.

Building the smart edge

This pressure is further compounded by another trend. Namely, with the rise of 5G came the rush to get ready for the ‘smart edge’. Businesses are looking to enable a high level of virtualisation, scalability, and efficiency at the edge level, to power a new breed of applications targeted at optimising local operations in real time. IT professionals are increasingly concerned by the massive dataset expected from edge devices, together with the amount of data mobility, plus a growing awareness over data protection.

Indeed, the notion of composable architecture has evolved a great deal and has now taken shape in various commercialisation efforts. These help to resolve the industry challenge we typically see as fragmentation of IT ecosystems. The pandemic has shone a spotlight on the importance of having distributed intelligence as well as a single/centralised management, monitoring and disaster recovery portal for heterogeneous workloads – cloud, virtual, or physical.

Businesses with better awareness and who act earlier to take advantage of composable IT plus the smart edge will emerge in a stronger position moving forwards.

Business owners, CEOs, and IT professionals are all navigating their way through the multitude of options to containerise, virtualise and software-define their services and infrastructure to keep service enablement quick and responsive whilst keeping costs low or optimised.

One thing we know for sure is that in the upcoming era a hybrid approach will be mainstream and data will inevitably ‘move’ a great deal more in between layers of network and cloud infrastructures.

Success will be determined by how quickly an organisation can move to smart, efficient, and cost-effective ways of navigating this new IT landscape. From where we see it, NAS/SAN are here to stay and take on new data management and protection challenges at the edge.

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