Thursday
Mar042010
2010 is the Year of Optimization of the Data Center
Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 6:33AM
It has become apparent to me, through talking with clients, chatting with IT executives while traveling, as well as reading in the IT press, that CIOs and CTOs within large organizations are going to be challenged to do more with the same in 2010 and beyond. Sure, we say this is the common paradigm in IT right; do more with less, but given the current worldwide economic challenges faced by global firms this year, I have discovered there is a real drive to optimize current investments in the IT infrastructure and make strategic investments where it makes sense. These investments are also being made in areas where the return on the investment can be quantified in business terms such as accelerated time to market of a new product or service or increased availability of an application platform which in turn drives increases revenue.
The larger firms, especially in financial services and manufacturing, are really looking at the cloud based computing strategies as well as SaaS (software as a service) as the next major paradigm to be able to get them to the savings and efficiencies they need to achieve. Furthermore, in order to do 2-3 times the volume you currently do, on the same amount of a smaller infrastructure requires a new way of looking at designing the datacenter. Furthermore, there are radically different approaches one must make in terms of application architecture and overall service management of the infrastructure.
Firms really need to focus on ways to get the arms around the current IT platform from an availability and performance perspective. Furthermore, to drive extreme efficiencies and reduce costs, one must have a very good idea of how the systems are interconnected from a business perspective i.e. applications that are running and what their dependencies are. One must also posses a thorough understanding of the data center network as well as their wide area network connectivity. In many cases today, many applications are latency sensitive, so they will begin to degrade in performance when geographic distance is introduced or multiple hops across network infrastructure is introduced.
There are a handful of vendors out there, across a multitude of disciplines, that are starting to react to this ensuing paradigm shift in data centers and the applications that are running in them. As wireless technologies mature, and with the introduction of 4G in Europe and in select cities in the United States, SaaS will become more prevalent in the next 12 - 24 ,months. Along with these deployment strategies comes new challenges in application performance management as well as measuring the experience of the end-user. Several technologies exist in the market that permit you to gain insight into application performance either from a macro end-user level or even from a transaction by transaction basis, which is especially critical in the financial services space.
In follow-up posts, I will discuss some of these enabling technologies and how they fit into they are a piece of the puzzle in terms of driving efficiencies in the data center and are useful for measuring those efficiencies in the long run.
The larger firms, especially in financial services and manufacturing, are really looking at the cloud based computing strategies as well as SaaS (software as a service) as the next major paradigm to be able to get them to the savings and efficiencies they need to achieve. Furthermore, in order to do 2-3 times the volume you currently do, on the same amount of a smaller infrastructure requires a new way of looking at designing the datacenter. Furthermore, there are radically different approaches one must make in terms of application architecture and overall service management of the infrastructure.
Firms really need to focus on ways to get the arms around the current IT platform from an availability and performance perspective. Furthermore, to drive extreme efficiencies and reduce costs, one must have a very good idea of how the systems are interconnected from a business perspective i.e. applications that are running and what their dependencies are. One must also posses a thorough understanding of the data center network as well as their wide area network connectivity. In many cases today, many applications are latency sensitive, so they will begin to degrade in performance when geographic distance is introduced or multiple hops across network infrastructure is introduced.
There are a handful of vendors out there, across a multitude of disciplines, that are starting to react to this ensuing paradigm shift in data centers and the applications that are running in them. As wireless technologies mature, and with the introduction of 4G in Europe and in select cities in the United States, SaaS will become more prevalent in the next 12 - 24 ,months. Along with these deployment strategies comes new challenges in application performance management as well as measuring the experience of the end-user. Several technologies exist in the market that permit you to gain insight into application performance either from a macro end-user level or even from a transaction by transaction basis, which is especially critical in the financial services space.
In follow-up posts, I will discuss some of these enabling technologies and how they fit into they are a piece of the puzzle in terms of driving efficiencies in the data center and are useful for measuring those efficiencies in the long run.
Reader Comments (1)
So what are some of the enabling technologies you are referring to? I am eager to hear about those.