The need for speed

When it comes to technology, size certainly isn’t everything. But speed might well be. Of all the qualities users looks for in almost every type of technology, the ability to get things done quickly, efficiently and effectively are probably still the main priorities, with other features and functionality arguably just window-dressing.

We speak regularly with CIOs and CTOs from organisations all over the world and speed and performance are two issues that never go away. What can be done to ensure infrastructure speeds are as fast as modern business requires? 

Infrastructure performance
From the earliest computers that did basic processing quicker than humans, through to the infrastructures that are the foundation of IT in modern business, technology has always been about getting things done as fast as possible. As a new IaaS recently launched to the market, it is the infrastructure that concerns us most – how can users can achieve the speed and performance needed in business today?

Infrastructure is truly the platform on which enterprise IT succeeds or fails. You can have the very best software but if it is running over an inefficient infrastructure it loses much of its potential. Few things are as frustrating as slow performance in IT and the rise of big data has certainly made this need even more pronounced.

Moving, managing and analysing large volumes of data can take enormous amounts of power at the best of times and to truly get value from big data it needs to be processed in real-time, or as close to that as is possible. The problem is that virtual environments are simply not suited to big data. Applications such as Hadoop provide powerful analytics, searching through data for patterns and relationships that will provide insight to help make more informed business decisions. But such applications are power hungry and crunch this type and volume of data, a powerful infrastructure is required.

Are virtual environments fast enough?
Yet virtual environments use a hypervisor, which are a drain on power. Using a hypervisor means much of the power of bare metal servers is wasted. Which is why with our infrastructure, we removed the hypervisor completely. This frees up so much more power, it means big data applications can run comfortably and the infrastructure functions at the desired speed.

It isn’t just us saying this either. A whole host of industry experts and thought leaders, from IBM to the founder of GigaSpaces have looked at this issue and found that hypervisors restrict speed and performance in a major way.

In today’s climate, where big data is increasingly integral to informed business decisions and speed is everything, slow infrastructure is simply unacceptable. The good news though is that it is also avoidable. A bare metal infrastructure is powerful and quick and compared to virtual clouds, our infrastructure delivers significantly better performance with the same resources.