Data infrastructure built on commodity hardware has a lot going for it: lower costs, higher flexibility, and the ability to rapidly scale to meet fluctuating workloads. But simply swapping out proprietary platforms for customizable software architectures is not the end of the story. A lot more must be considered before we even get close to the open, dynamic data environments that most organizations are striving for.
The leading example of commodity infrastructure is Facebook, which recently unveiled plans for yet another massive data center in Europe – this time in Clonee, Ireland. The facility will utilize the company’s Open Compute Project framework, which relies on advanced software architectures atop low-cost commodity hardware and is now available to the enterprise community at large in the form of a series of reference architectures that are free for the asking. The idea is that garden variety enterprises and cloud providers will build their own modular infrastructure to support the kinds of abstract, software-defined environments needed for Big Data, the Internet of Things and other emerging initiatives.
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