Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Data Center Vision

Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO Magazine has a blog entry recently titled "Will the Phone Company Run Your Data Center?". Laurianne interviewed Bill Coleman from BEA Software, whose vision is that companies will trust the phone companies to run their data centers in 10-15 years.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea, but I would venture to guess their are some similar visions out there. I do like his reference to utility computing though. I know there are those who think we won't go to a lights out data center any time soon, but I believe it will happen sooner than you think.



Colocation companies, phone companies, power companies, Google, or perhaps the KOA campgrounds (for the Sun Black Box farms) -- some entity is going to house massive amounts of computing power and will offer it up on a utility basis to enterprises. Also playing into my belief of a utility computing realization is a fascination with grid technologies. I think instead of building your own data center or outsourcing it to one or two other companies/locations, your computing infrastructure will be spread out over dozens of different data centers that are a part of a grid that you buy processing power on. All of your applications have been virtualized to the grid and there is no need to worry about individual servers or infrastructure going down or needing maintenance. It also buys automatic Disaster Recovery and BCP.



Ok....enough for one night. The above are just my random ramblings, so please don't take them for anything more. :)

Here is the CIO blog post Will the Phone Company Run Your Data Center?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

He underestimates the human desire to control.

Very few entities, least of all the MegaTelcos, can be TRUSTED to maintain the lifeblood of another company. If they can't fix a small company's broken T-1 without agonizing delays and frustrations how could that small company take the giant leap of entrusting their entire IT infrastructure to that same barely competent Teclo?

Ask any IT Director/CIO and every one of them has a long list of horror stories about dealings with Telcos. From billing screwups to missed install deadlines. There's no way they'd risk their company's future by entrusting their mission-critical IT to some Telco and their staff of buffoons.

It MIGHT be somebody else, but it sure as hell won't be a Telco that succeeds with this idea of "utility computing". It will also require a complete culture change in how software is written and sold. Don't hold your breath waiting for that. Microsoft's stranglehold on the software sector has been the largest impediment to innovations that would allow this sort of "utility computing" to happen and most of all WORK. Windows, even as a server OS is really just an extension and enabler of their desktop monopoly, and I don't see Balmer relaxing that grip anytime soon.

--chuck