|
Data Center Managers, get ready for the future:
the Adaptive IT organization and infrastructure
David Pultorak
While different vendors and research firms each put their own name and spin on it—the agile business, organic infrastructure, utility computing, adaptive infrastructure, the adaptive enterprise—the trend is clear: businesses need agility and are depending on the IT organization and IT infrastructure to support that need.
To be clear, agility by itself doesn’t buy businesses anything. The business must be agile and able to sense and respond to a continuous stream of necessary change in order to survive. But its response must be appropriate and must include maintaining stability and efficiency in the midst of continuous change. This ‘killer combination’ is known as adaptivity and is the chief characteristic of the adaptive enterprise.
In the adaptive enterprise, the resources of the organization are deployed and managed so that they can sense the changes needed by the business and respond by provisioning and reallocating resources where and when needed, all in real time. Not surprisingly, the adaptive enterprise requires an adaptive IT organization and an adaptive IT infrastructure that is not very realistic or feasible. However, this situation is changing as vendors are lining up to realign their offerings over the next few years to further enhance their adaptivity.
For you as the datacenter manager, adaptivity will require a fundamental change. The primary objects you manage are going to fundamentally change in nature, much as they did as we moved from the mainframe to the network era of computing. As a consequence, the composition of your role as a manager will change. Put another way, what you will be dealing with and what you will need to do to get your job done effectively is going to change significantly. My goal in this article is to give you a glimpse of the change and its consequences for you because as they say, “forewarned is forearmed”.
How the object of datacenter management will change in the Adaptive Enterprise
- The virtualization of datacenter infrastructure will continue to accelerate until the resources of the datacenter become one large pool of resources with soft versus hard boundaries between where they can be deployed and redeployed.
- The management technology of the datacenter is going to continue its evolution toward automatic provisioning at the software as well as the hardware level and toward dynamic reallocation of resources to where and when they are needed.
- In addition to automating dynamic reallocation of resources, datacenter management technology will increase the mobility of demand, workload
- Technology will operate across platforms, not just within them
- These changes will extend in scope beyond their traditional targets—applications, databases, networks, telecommunications circuits—to include people, processes, and services as well.
|
