The Evolving Data Center Landscape

There is a shift in enterprise hardware from expensive, proprietary hardware to cheap components plucked directly from the consumer hardware supply chain. While that trend has been underway for some time thanks to companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon rolling their own data centers, the next wave of enterprise IT is taking its cues from the mobile supply chain’s collection of components -- the stuff that your mobile phone is made of. That includes everything from power-sipping ARM chips to flash-based memory. Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine is joined by Coho Data CEO Ramana Jonnala and Cumulus Networks CEO JR Rivers for a discussion about the consumerization of the datacenter. Where is the hardware coming from? How will software make it all work? What does it mean for incumbent hardware and software vendors? And how will customers buy all this data center muscle?

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