A validated design is a promise: this architecture runs this workload, at this scale, and we will stand behind the fit. The founding team of C4C built validated reference architectures the first time the industry did this, in the converged infrastructure era, and watched the discipline decay into marketing. C4C Validated Designs brings it back, with the part the industry dropped: every design tells you what it is not for.
The discipline
Every design states the workloads it is for. No design is pitched as fitting everything, because nothing does.
Every design also names the workloads it is the wrong choice for, and points at the right one. This is the part vendor reference architectures leave out.
Public pages describe compute, accelerator, storage and networking classes. Specific bills of materials are produced in the sizing engagement, where they can be right.
Nothing is bought off the page. A design becomes a configured bill of materials only after a sizing conversation confirms the fit, and you are free to take the outcome elsewhere.
The design lines
Further design lines follow the same discipline as they are published. If the workload you need designed is not here yet, the sizing conversation still is: talk to us.
The heritage
Validated designs only work when the people publishing them have been burned by the alternative. We built and sold reference architectures at the vendors that invented the category, and we know exactly where the honest version ends and the sales version begins.
That is why the C4C versions publish their limits. A design you cannot rule out is not a design, it is a brochure.
Tell us what you need to run and we will tell you which design fits, or that none of them do and what to do instead.
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