From Interop 2012: Data Center Changes and the New IT
Carol Blanchar, M.S., CEO, Conexo
There are 3 pivot points around which Data Centers (DC’s) are transforming their architecture and organization:
1. Decreases in Data Center operational investment and expense through virtualization
2. More efficient IT resource utilization from public cloud scale and multi-tenancy
3. Increasing organizational success from Innovation (Consumer productivity, Sustainable transformation)
The business case for IT services from large public clouds is overwhelming. (There is a specific case to be made for a hybrid model where unique innovation and services are kept in-house as part of the core mission. See Dell’s Interop Keynote, showing a cloud for pediatric genome services for cancer patients.) A public cloud improves security, flexibility, risk management, investments, expenses, and technology migration. Most of all, it frees up internal IT staff to focus on innovation, productivity, and learning. More about the economics from the Microsoft Azure director in his Keynote.
The network may be the key to programmatic control of policy governing availability and access in the Cloud. Cisco, Juniper, and others are adding network services to remove functional and architectural siloes that destroy productivity and IT payback. The goal is to keep the data center neutral as to Operating Systems, Browsers, Data Storage, Devices, , and Media, including Video.
The world has already begun to shift as servers go virtual. A public cloud provider will often begin with 100K servers, ordering 10K at a time, easily installing and moving as needed, with an administrator ratio of 1 for 200 servers. Computing power, with demand pulled by devices becoming cheaper and available everywhere, will increase by orders of magnitude in the next 8 years, which means that more powerful hardware servers will still be sold year to year, but many times more, and even more powerful, virtual servers deployed at an increasing rate year-to-year. Check out Intel’s Keynote presentation at Interop for a look at the expected growth in global capability and emerging uses.
Virtual servers combine with virtual storage to enable vast new experiences and information exchanges between people. They are moving to become a single knowledge network that can allow the DC to function as a single ecosystem, or fabric. One example – Juniper’s Q-Fabric, see their Interop Keynote presentation.
Another way to think of the cloud-based Data Center is as “DC as software”. That is, as virtual, separated from the physical components. The capability to make the components behave as one virtual machine is largely provided today by VMware, and their Interop presentation can help you understand where they are today, and where they are headed.
So we use the word “infrastructure” in a new way, not referring to a part of the stack or a physical data center . A Cloud-based Data Center is a single infrastructure that delivers services through a complex layer of Apps.
“App” is a term taken from the word “application”, a new kind of application. An App is software that delivers the services of the Data Center infrastructure for safe, effective, productive use. From a virtual DC ecosystem, Apps deliver value to the consumer, return information to the organization, and enable rapid innovation and transformation. Billing can be an App, as can storage provisioning, load balancing, business analytics, customer tracking, an operating system, or document management. In a Cloud infrastructure, if it uses IT services to do work, it’s an App.
Current IT organizations find themselves buying infrastructure services, building their own policies, provisioning, and sets of Apps that not only make their own teams productive and effective, but can be made available to third parties with similar needs for their own use and App development. A great example is Zynga and its Z-Cloud – watch the video of their Keynote address at Interop, and also the Google presentation on Docs and the emerging Google Drive.
So the Data Center move to the cloud is underway, as is the IT move to a focus on innovation, productivity and services for ongoing organizational transformation and sustainability. “Change is the evolutionary process by which everything becomes something else.” (Sign at the Stevens Creek Nature Center marshland.) This Information Technology change has been a long time coming, it is creating something entirely different, and it will never go back.
