September 2020

Search engines, social networks, cloud business platforms and even streaming live television, they all have one thing in common – the compute, storage & network fabric that makes them possible. The fabric, is a hyper scaled array of millions of servers & storage devices clustered in some remote location and all such clusters connected through warp speed dark fiber. If data is the oil, this fabric is the offshore drilling platform and if data is the product, this fabric is the manufacturing plant! Interestingly, manufacturing plants or the offshore drilling platforms kept evolving over the last century or so – getting faster, better, smarter over time. Automation, Interconnection and Intelligence became the hallmark of 21st century industry, and the trend aptly termed as fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. The compute fabric, we talked about in the previous section, played an important role in automation, interconnection and intelligence of the modern day industry. Now flipping the narrative on it’s head – did the industry play an important role in development of compute fabric? Cloud computing has been an enabler of Industry 4.0 however is Industry 4.0 paradigm being applied to the evolution of compute fabric to be faster, better and smarter? Is there a way to design , commission and operate hyper scaled compute infrastructure at 2X or 5X speed and run it a higher operating efficiency? Let’s examine the… Read More »Digitizing Hyperscalers – Digital Data Centers

Consumer goods, industrial products or pharmaceutical drugs – they all follow a lifecycle of creation, production, consumption and replacement by better products. The value creation at every stage of the lifecycle is vital to the evolution of not just the businesses, but also our society and the planet. All engineering disciplines focus on this value creation and generally are manifested in velocity, utility and cost associated with the stage Monetization of the value creation has traditionally been in the form of ownership transfer or throwing it over the wall. When you buy a smartphone, you pay the full price of the phone even if you use only 20% of its designed utility and eventually replace it with the new shiny toy. It has been simpler, though not most efficient, for businesses to sell you the utility through complete transfer of ownership of the product. If there was a system of engagement, that runs seamlessly from creation through consumption, it should be possible to optimize velocity, cost and utility on a continual basis. One of the easiest way to visualize this is in the way streaming video services work today – both content and presentation are continually evolving and being delivered for one subscription fee. Development of such streaming platforms and operations are interwoven in modern software lifecycle such as DevOps. Think of Digital thread and twin to be the DevOps… Read More »Digital Thread & Twin – Key to subscription economy