|
In the mainframe era, the typical data center was designed to support a single centralized platform with a single operating system and a relatively small population of applications. Although data center management was complicated, computer workloads were well defined and well understood. As we know, those days are long gone. Today, the typical data center has a myriad of servers running different operating systems and a large variety of applications. The complexity of the data center has exploded and the ability to manage the data center’s overall workload has, in many organizations, decayed to a dangerous level. In addition, both internal and external compliance initiatives now demand much stricter and more visible governance of an organization’s whole IT operation.
The data center does not appear to be managed as a single unified environment either to customers or to internal IT users, and it is not. Typically, each function that supports the data center is a separate function within the IT department. These areas typically do not orchestrate their tasks together. For example, the organization responsible for network management does not coordinate its activities with the group responsible for data management.
The lack of integration is generally just the result of explosive growth. IT management never expected that data centers would grow so large. The structure of these organizations, combined with the management software in use, reflects this lack of integration. This reality is compounded by the fact that many data centers have simply run out of space.
A number of factors have emerged that clearly demonstrate the requirement for a more holistic approach to data center management. They are:
- Compliance and security requirements from multiple sources
- Improve efficiency of power consumption and resource utilization
- The need to implement and manage virtualization technologies in order to improve resource productivity.
- The automation of business processes across highly distributed environments encouraged by the introduction of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
- The need to improve the way processes are managed to support corporate goals.
To add to this, the business world has become increasingly dynamic. An organization often has a network of relationships across partners, suppliers, and customers that needs to be managed in a holistic manner. As companies become more and more dependent on these networks, it is imperative that they can be managed in a predictable and dynamic manner.
At the core of what organizations now want from their data centers is predictability; predictable costs, predictable staffing levels and predictable performance service levels for IT users and customers. This is complicated by the fact that the overall workload of the data center is increasing because new applications are added and new connections are demanded for partners, suppliers, and customers. Many of these new business requirements render the old technology in place obsolete and unable to keep up with demand. In such a situation it is no wonder that management is demanding predictability.
The Data Center as a Highly Functioning Factory
It is not a stretch to state that the typical data center could benefit greatly from automation. It may not have been so decades ago in the tightly controlled era of the mainframe, but it is so now. Some of the problems stem from the fact that much of the management software didn’t cater for new platforms that were introduced, or simply couldn’t work across hundreds or thousands of servers. Just as applications were built and implemented in silos, so was most of the data center’s management software. We should not be surprised by this. Such software is just a business application of a kind, and the way such products are implemented follows the usual procedures for implementing business applications. But the consequence of this was that data centers were themselves organized around silos of activity.
In many ways we can think of a data center as a factory. It resembles a factory in the sense that it has staff that needs to carry out regular well-defined activities. It also has purpose-built machinery for processing a regular and scheduled set of work. It resembles a factory in the sense that, from an organizational perspective, the management goals include ensuring the quality of its processes, having very few breakdowns and holding down costs.
|
