Vanessa Alvarez, Scale Computing | VMworld 2013

John Furrier was joined for the last day of VMworld 2013 in San Francisco by Jeff Frick and they interviewed Vanessa Alvarez, Head of Marketing at Scale Computing, for the flagship interview series theCUBE.

Alvarez is a self-proclaimed "fan of converged infrastructure" and she got to talk in depth about Scale Computing, virtualization and the trends in the business.

"We have a converged infrastructure of server storage and virtualization. The fact that VMware is finally bringing those pieces together is [a] testament to the fact that converged infrastructure is the future of IT." In terms of user experience, Alvarez believes "today IT has to be simplified."

According to Alvarez, "No one wants to deal with managing separate servers, separate networking, separate storage. IT wants simplified infrastructure so that they can deliver a better user experience. That's really the core of bringing these three components together."

Asked what she thought about "virtualization as a disruptive enabler", she dared say that "virtualization today is mainstream." Alvarez also took the time to do a recap of what was going on in the business for the last couple of years. She explains: "Companies have gone through the whole phase of server consolidation, and the benefits of virtualization are real today. The shift we're seeing today is that people want to go beyond server consolidation. They really want to leverage virtualization to achieve a higher level of management and orchestration within their environment. That's where you start to see private cloud coming out on its own, and the fact that the companies really need to build up their private clouds in order to be able to fully achieve the benefits and the efficiency of virtualization."

It wasn't always that obvious though. "The first step was virtualization and consolidation. It took a while for the companies to do that. In order to move forward, it's key to bring in the network and the storage components. At Scale Computing that's what we do: Integrated Architecture. We've seen VMware do the same thing: they started to bring in NSX, Vsense, and they are tying together those three pieces with (software) Intelligence. That's the next step: bringing those pieces together and making sure they're interconnected and efficiently utilized within the environment.The level after that is still an open field in terms of who makes it," said Alvarez.

As for current trends like hyperconversion and hyperscale, "they are driving the market to a different level. You can scale your infrastructure environment far beyond what we thought we could possibly do, and today it is all about simplified infrastructure. We have highly automated solutions: we rack it, stack it and power it. Our customers don't want to invest in managing infrastructure, but in business growth. We deliver simplified IT: simple, available, scalable."

If you are unfamiliar with the company, Scale Computing develops scale-out clustered IT infrastructure products for small to medium-sized organizations based on its patented ICOS [Intelligent Clustered Operating System] technology.

Vanessa Alvarez, Scale Computing, at VMworld 2013 with John Furrier and Jeff Frick

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