Daily Archives: June 16, 2010

Okay, let’s talk hardware. Choosing the right hardware and technologies are essential for the success of your cloud. This post covers the fundamentals of hardware selection for your cloud – pointers to get your brain cells focused on specs vs. brands, compute resources vs. servers…you get the idea. With all this hardware you will eventually have the means of building your reference architecture – but that’s the next post in this series. For the sake of delivering workloads to anyone from anywhere based on expected levels of service, your focus should be on raw performance, efficiency (to include total operating cost, overhead, and management), integration, and scalability. One point to remember – the most expensive components won’t necessarily ensure you meet SLA’s or make for a faster/better cloud. Cost is often just as important as performance, if not more important, and should be considered just as any other critical criteria. Keep this in mind as you disagree with the forthcoming pointers J

When I discuss hardware with my customers, I stick to performance levels and expectations, varying levels of integration, and the technologies that will tie the infrastructure all together. Choosing the right hardware doesn’t mean use Dell for this and EMC for that (although it might)…it means selecting the hardware components that will ensure you meet SLA’s and fulfill your business criteria…period.