To BNT, the network isn’t just about pipes; it’s a true business enabler. On June 3rd, 2010, at the end of our press trip in Silicon Valley, we have had the opportunity to meet with Vikram Mehta, President and CEO of Blade Network Technologies (BNT), a four-year-old company dedicated to “providing the interconnect fabric” behind cloud computing to put it in the words of our host who welcomed us at BNT’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Ca.
What is behind this concept of “interconnect fabric” is the provision of intelligent networking and storage application connectivity for virtualised data centres.
Blade Network Technologies: The network as a business enabler
Blade Network Technologies: “we do business with people for whom, when the network goes down, it will cost millions of dollars!”
What is keeping CIOs awake at night?
What I particularly liked about Vikram’s presentation was his introduction in which he described very clearly the 7 pain points which are keeping CIOs awake at night.
- First and foremost, scalability – the almost obligatory buzzword in the infrastructure industry and the Bay area in particular – is of the essence. As businesses grow rapidly and business owners rely extensively on IT to support their needs, the requirement for that IT infrastructure to grow with the business is becoming an imperative,
- as data centres have to grow exponentially, density is one of the most critical issues that IT managers have to face. It’s a matter of packing as much computing and storage power as possible in as little space. Yet, it’s not just an issue of piling up more storage bays and blades; it’s also a matter of providing the critical connectivity between these various elements (computing, storage and I/O). All of these leading to mind-boggling issues in the data centre,
- thirdly, faster and larger deployment of such infrastructure is a towering issue. Imagine a large investment bank which was used to deploy 5,000 new servers each year. That very same bank – because of the increasing importance of automatic trading – was led to deploying 100,000 servers last year! This is what happened to Morgan Stanley, and BNT helped the Bank overcome that issue and even won an award in that process,
- fourthly, maximising the utilisation of that infrastructure is critical too. Not all servers are used in the same way. Some sort of yield management (i.e. the method pioneered by airlines in the 1980s to maximise the number of passengers per aircraft) is necessary to optimise the usage of deployed resources,
- the fifth problem that CIOs are facing in this mass computing age is security, a topic often tackled on our own blogs. As more business is pushed online, namely in banking and investment banking as seen in the above example, more security is needed because hackers will always focus on a) where the information is widely available online b) where big money flows,
- next on CIOs’ agenda is the need to be able to mine such data efficiently across huge databases. In essence, if more data is stored online, real-time drill down in humongous databases becomes a critical issue, as seen in detail with our visit to Clustrix in San Francisco,
- last but not least comes the total cost of ownership (TCO) issue, which is obviously and directly linked to this exponential growth in server and capacity deployment in the data centre.
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Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique.
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