Hyperscale is disrupting the enterprise market, leaving CIOs with no choice but to take a page out of Facebook and Google’s book. Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman discussed the impact of hyperscale on enterprise IT and shared his analysis of key drivers behind this phenomenon in a whiteboard presentation on the SiliconAngle channel.

Miniman starts by noting the core difference between the two segments: traditional enterprises spend money to save time, while hyperscale companies spend time to save money. Facebook employs one admin per 20,000 servers, a ratio that is orders of magnitude higher than what less resourceful enterprises can achieve on their own. The social networking giant and its hyperscale peers have lowered management costs and increased efficiency across the board thanks to a combination of disposable servers and a good deal of automation.

Enterprises can’t cobble together a hyperscale environment on their own, but they have access to pre-packed solutions that address the same requirements. The growing adoption of hyperscale is driving what Wikibon calls software-led infrastructure; a methodology that delivers four distinct benefits:

– Scale-out: the ability to add infrastructure incrementally, or piece by piece. EqualLogic and Isilon pioneered this technology with their point storage solutions.
– Automation. Software-led infrastructure replaces hard-coded functionality with a hardware agnostic management solution.
– Simplification. Software-led environments and converged infrastructure (a market that will be worth more than $17 billion in 2016) eliminate “undifferentiated heavy lifting” with rack-level convergence, a methodology that doesn’t treat the computer, storage and network as separate silos.
– Innovation. It paves the way for new technologies including flash and the public cloud.

Miniman advises CIOs to look for solutions that address these four areas and boost productivity. Check out the full video for info about three vendors that deliver real hyperscale in an integrated box.