My how things have come full circle. As we talk about hyper-convergence, I think back to the previous version of H-C. Think long and hard onto at one. What was it? Well remember, hyper-convergence requires the skills of a server administrator, a network administrator, a storage administrator and lastly the OS and application administrator. All those skills rolled up into one.
So in a sense, we’ve seen this before, in the mid 90’s. Take two Compaq Proliant 1000s with 4x2GB drives, two 3Com network cards each and a 3Com FDDi card. Now slap on Novell Netware SFT and a Btrieve app and there you have it. Nobody needed to be a deep specialist, they were generalists running that whole “stack”.
Fast forward to today and we’re seeing the same , but faster, bigger, better and more cost efficient. I’m thinking of a vBlock 100, VMware vSphere and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. All can be run by one person with the generalist skillset, not even needing to be very deep in any one area, but skilled enough to have it deployed and running to support the business. So hail the return of the Hyper-converged Generalist !!!!
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