Welcome to Day 4 of our Ten Days of Holiday Cheer series! Working from the incredible content that the dozens of speakers and hundreds of participants created in GCDCS20, we are opening up our event archives to give everyone in the data centre/IT service delivery community a chance to end 2020 on a high note.
On the fourth day of holiday cheer, we look at one of the key issues in IT service delivery: the move to SDx/IAC (software-defined everything/Infrastructure as Code) – the adoption of software as a means of abstracting control over hardware resources.
The SDx/IAC track benefitted from extraordinarily strong contributors at all points in the session. The track began, as many GCDCS20 tracks did, with a user/case perspective. For SDx/IAC, this was furnished by Craig McLellan, founder of data-services-via-the-cloud provider ThinkOn; Criag described the ways that SDx/IAC makes it possible for his firm to deliver services that connect to many different client providers on one hand, and many different data sources and hyperscale providers on the other.
The next session in the SDx/IAC track was the Spotlight Presentation: a set of 10 “what can we expect?” predictions from Shawn Rosemarin, VP – Worldwide Systems Engineering for Pure Storage. Shawn’s insightful view into the future, which spanned ten key issues that will drive SDx in 2021 and beyond, both delivered valuable perspective and perfectly set the stage for the “Building SDx/IAC Strategy” panel discussion. Here, Shawn was joined by Sanj Srikrishnan, Senior Global Solutions Architect for Equinix, and Rami Radi, Data Centre Solutions architect for Intel. Craig McLellan made an appearance in the panel discussion as well, taking over from moderator Michael O’Neil of InsightaaS to ask his own questions of Shawn, Sanj and Rami.
In the end, the SDx/IAC track functioned exactly as intended: it provided a vision of the data centre/IT service delivery future, through the eyes of global experts – nearly all of who have Canadian industry roots – capable of providing a bridge from current requirement to future operational norms.
[Navigation: 0:00 Introduction; 1:18 SDx/IAC Case Study (Craig McLellan, ThinkOn); 15:38 Predictions – SDx and “Infrastructure as Code” (Shawn Rosemarin, Pure Storage); 25:33 Building SDx/IAC Strategy panel discussion (Shawn Rosemarin; Sanj Srikrishan, Equinix; Rami Radi, Intel)]
The 10 Days of Holiday Cheer!
- Day 1: Community Wisdom – Quantum, DevOps and transformative technology procurement and deployment
- Day 2: The Best in Sustainability Insight
- Why Canada? Andrew Eppich on Equinix’s $1B investment in Canadian data centres
- Day 4: The software-defined future
All ’10 Days of Holiday Cheer!’ sessions are available to GCDCS20 subscribers. If you are one of the 600 members of this group, simply log into the virtual event portal and select the “Spotlight” tab to gain access to these and other resources, If you didn’t register before the live event, please follow this link and click on “Register” – you’ll get access to video interviews, the new “Data Centre Management in the 2020s” ebook, new sessions and opportunities for interaction in January/February/March – and, of course, access to all of the footage from GCDCS20.
