Extreme makeover, legacy technology edition

"If you were to design IT from scratch, if you walked in with a clean sheet of paper, you could design anything you want, would you design what we’ve got now?" That's the question asked by Tech Field Day organizer Stephen Foskett in a SiliconAngle interview at the recent Dell World 2012.

He answers his own question: "And the answer is 'no freaking way.' No way in the world would I make a bunch of giant PCs attached to a bunch of fake disks over a specialized network. None of this makes sense."

Many IT executives and professionals don't have the option to redesign their systems from scratch -- that's why virtualization and converged infrastructure is such a game changer, Foskett continues. 

Currently, within most enterprises, there's a push and pull between conventional  applications designed for a conventional windows and Linux fat PC and server world and the new, emerging cloud world. "That’s the cool thing about virtualization," he explains. "It lets you transition from a real backward concept -- which is the Microsoft server concept -- into the future, which has standardized layers and standardized infrastructure."

Foskett points to new, smaller vendors emerging on the scene -- such as Nutanix, Scale Computing, and Simplivity -- which offer ways to bring legacy applications into the cloud realm. But the shift to virtualization and converged infrastructure will be gradual and take some time, he cautions.  "What they’re doing is basically asking that core question, which is: 'if we were to do this again, how would we do it? How would we do it differently, but yet maintaining backward compatibility?'"

Virtualization and converged infrastructure help bring together the old world of on-premises legacy applications and the new world of cloud applications, Foskett points out. Today, backward compatibility is an issue with cloud computing, he continues. "With the cloud, there’s no compatibility," he says. "And we're  still going to have to have the same kind of applications running for the next 10-20 years. It's just the new applications that are going to run in the cloud."

Scaling is another issue that's not going to go away anytime soon, he adds. "The hardest, number-one challenge technically is scaling," Foskett says. "Getting anything -- storage, network, servers whatever -- to get bigger and smaller on demand. The coolest thing that the cloud does is scale, to tremendous levels. If you're going to have a converged infrastructure, it has to scale, and frankly, that’s a huge technical challenge."

(Thumbnail photo: Stephen Foskett, via Tech Field Day site.)