Converged Data Platforms: Part of a Larger Trend

The modern computing paradigm began with a completely converged data center: the mainframe. As soon as the required compute capacity exceeded the largest mainframe, distributed computing was born. What started as #SunMicrosystem’s notion that “the network is the computer” now implies that the cloud—public, private or hybrid—is the computer; a fantastically complex, powerful, and mammoth computer. But that computer is incomplete, because it is not yet the completely integrated, boundless, or frictionless application and data platform that one would get from a “limitless mainframe.”

That is the direction the software industry, and open source software movement, has been heading since the network became the computer: the converged (virtual) data center. You can tick off a progression of technologies that enable the converged data center: a common microprocessor architecture (x86), an open source server operating system ( #Linux ), an open source way to converge server instances (Xen/KVM hypervisor), an open source containerization of applications (Docker/Mesos) and a way to store and manage data at a vast scale ( #Hadoop ). You can add software-defined networking, database services (SQL/NoSQL), application execution engines (#Spark, #Elastic, #MapReduce), and a management harness ( #OpenStack ) to more or less complete the picture.

http://insidebigdata.com/2016/03/21/converged-data-platforms-part-of-a-larger-trend/