How the Disaggregation of Hardware Is Democratizing Innovation

The 1999 launch of VMware’s first product, Workstation1, was one of the catalysts of the disaggregated infrastructure practice that provides the agility, speed and efficient resource utilization required to support advanced workloads in modern datacenters. Today, small- and medium-sized companies have the opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively move their innovative designs to mass production and compete with the largest enterprises on a global scale. 

VMware enabled users to run multiple instances of operating systems in virtual machines on one server. That opened business leaders’ eyes to the fact that they had an alternative to incurring the high costs and complexities of overprovisioning and adding more physical servers to the traditional data center. 

Enterprises began exploring how to leverage virtualization across more of their applications, servers, storage, and networks to reduce costs, relieve their IT teams of the burden of maintaining peak use datacenter hardware, and, more recently, support the rise of DevOps. 

Choice breeds competition, and the hardware solutions market is no exception. For example, end user enterprises don't have to settle for inadequate software services that hardware providers often layer on top of its proprietary networking equipment. Enterprise customers can purchase hardware from one vendor and deploy the software of their choice that provides the same service levels, at a fraction of the cost. 

The enterprise acceptance and maturity of the open source software (OSS) community has expanded these options exponentially. According to Red Hat’s 2022 The State of Enterprise Open Source report, IT leaders prioritize enterprise open source over traditional solutions to meet challenges and build their infrastructure strategies. 82% are more likely to select a vendor who contributes to the open source community.

Today, whether a company plans to rebrand a white label hardware product to sell to its end user customers or is the end user deploying unbranded hardware via its service provider, it doesn’t have to accept a one-size-fits-all solution. Working with a hardware manufacturing and services provider, it can design and build a customized solution that meets its individual needs at a fraction of the cost of purchasing off-the-shelf hardware from an OEM.

Just as important as the flexibility and cost-savings the hardware disaggregation trend provides, companies can focus on their business priority: innovation. Their employees focus on creating next-gen technology products, not worrying about how to scale manufacturing or manage IT infrastructures.  

Marc Andressen’s famous 2011 prediction that software will eat the world has become a reality. Even businesses that have long been considered hardware manufacturers are becoming software developers, integrating AI, machine learning, and other cutting-edge software technology into their products. But make no mistake - software companies still need innovative hardware solutions to launch their products. Fortunately, the disaggregation of hardware ensures that innovation is not the sole domain of enterprises with enormous IT budgets and teams of highly-trained IT professionals.

As a leader in datacenter infrastructure technologies, Celestica partners with our customers to deliver innovative storage, compute, and networking solutions. Our 25+ years of experience, engineering expertise, and investments in our cutting-edge portfolio of hardware platform solutions enable us to help our customers navigate rapidly evolving market landscapes and deliver early-to-market products with the latest technologies. 

We will unveil our newest hardware solutions at the Flash Memory Summit on August 2-4 in Santa Clara, Calif. If you plan to attend, please visit us at booth #746 or visit our Flash Memory Summit webpage to learn more about our latest data storage solutions.