When the global supply chain came to a screeching halt in 2021, organizations worldwide responded in different ways, often creating new workarounds that became permanent. ServiceNow Chief Technology Officer Pat Casey took a different route — in January 2022, he placed orders for a year’s worth of data center hardware to avoid complications down the line. ServiceNow, the platform-as-a-service provider, hosts clients on its own infrastructure, so the CTO can’t afford to wait for orders to come back to “normal.”
Casey claims that ServiceNow meets its needs with midrange CPUs, and that upgrading to more expensive chips isn’t worth the upcharge. The company operates on the x86 infrastructure and uses locally attached NVMe storage housed on separate cards. It was also an early adopter of Fusion-io hardware, now manufactured by SanDisk. In August 2021, ServiceNow acquired German database vendor Swarm64 in hopes of enabling rapid analytics — and possibly primary storage.
While Casey is handling all things infrastructure, he also oversees the development of ServiceNow products, with a focus on ensuring user interfaces remain user-friendly. With his forward-thinking in the hardware supply chain, he seems capable of coming up with good short- and long-term strategies alike.
