Craig Waters

Building a cloud architecture - Server/Storage Combined

Yahoo was formerly a huge "shared storage" shop. But Yahoo, like nearly every other leading Internet "cloud" company, moved away from shared storage as its primary hosting environment due to inflexibility and high cost. Yahoo instead adopted the Google model of utilizing inexpensive servers with local disks. The traditional enterprise data center utilizes separate tiers of servers and storage arrays. Nutanix, like Google, believes that this architecture is fundamentally flawed. Data center infrastructure intelligence should reside in the software, not in proprietary equipment. A software-defined data center enables use of commodity hardware that can very quickly be replaced or augmented as the CPU, flash and HDD industry technology advances. It is significantly less expensive to implement, is more resilient and vastly more scalable. It is also much simpler to manage. Nutanix has met with great market acceptance. IT leaders tend to quickly grasp that the Nutanix virtual computing platform provides true convergence. It is hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple. Nutanix has won multiple awards including Best of VMworld, and is on track to be the fastest-growing hardware infrastructure company of all time.

Craig Waters' Biography
As senior system engineer, Craig plays a vital role in consulting some of the largest enterprises in Australia and New Zealand to define and develop their IT architectures. Craig is a Virtualisation Architect and a Data Centre Specialist (Compute/Storage/Network) with over 16 years of experience in the ICT industry. Focusing on virtualisation, in both his current and past endeavors Craig has enabled enterprises to gain business agility by reducing infrastructure complexity through aggressive virtualisation initiatives. Building on this technology foundation has allowed the implementation of business resilience programs incorporating full disaster recovery.

Previous contributions included senior architecture and consulting positions at Rack Consulting Pty, Dimension Data, IceFire Technologies, CCS Index and Data Recall. Craig's community involvement includes leading the Melbourne VMware User, being awarded vExpert status, hosting the APACVirtual Podcast and promoting the local APAC virtualisation community via his blog (featuring the vCatchup series of interviews). He was recently recognised globally with the 2011 VMUG Leader Awards - President's Award and locally being mentioned during the 2011 vForum Keynote speech in Sydney, Australia. Craig was also designated a vExpert 2012 in recognition of his contributions to the VMware, virtualisation, and cloud computing community.