Next up, a forum to explain tech hype

The .Next Computing Forum is taking place in Dublin this Thursday, and aims to cut through technology hype and explain how the current wave of disruptive data-centre technologies will affect future IT plans for Irish businesses.

The forum will explain what buzzwords like hyper-converged infrastructure, software-defined architectures and flash storage mean.

It will also examine where Irish businesses should begin with new technologies that promise to simplify IT; how virtualisation is creating challenges for legacy compute and storage architectures; and why web-scale companies like Google and Facebook have gone back to the drawing board when architecting their data centres.

Data Solutions managing director and event organiser, Michael O’Hara said the eagerness of industry commentators to slap the label “next generation” on anything and everything has left IT decision-makers wary of what exactly they should be looking for.

He said businesses may not match a Facebook or Google in absolute scale of operations, but they still face many of the same challenges and limitations of traditional infrastructure.

“As the digital wave advances organisations must act quickly to create an enterprise data-centre strategy that is ultra-agile, scalable and responsive to change. On the user side organisations must develop a ‘workplace of the future’ strategy that enables individual user workstyles while still meeting business goals.”