Archive for the ‘Data Center Strategy’ Category
Smaller, lighter, and more agile are more than just industry buzzwords. IT organizations that fail to lead those charges will get relegated to cost centers.
In an industry where innovation threatens to tear down legacy systems and practices (and vendors) just as it generates new opportunities, IT organizations are nonetheless resistant to change. It’s natural to fear the unknown, question the unproven, be skeptical of the latest and greatest.
Even pros who pride themselves on keeping up with the hottest technologies are prone to pooh-poohing the latest trends. Note the continued enterprise IT resistance to the cloud, consumer, and social movements–”non-compliant,” “insecure,” “overrated,” “frivolous,” “nothing really new here” … pick your reason(s) for not buying in.
Most CIOs understand that the old IT rulebook needs revisions, mostly because colleagues in marketing, HR, and other departments are making noises about working around their organizations (or are already doing so). But many IT teams continue to hang on to existing practices: developing expensive native apps when the Web variety will do; securing perimeters and devices rather than the most sensitive data; abiding the use of software as a service and other public cloud offerings for only non-strategic apps and infrastructure; shutting out the personal devices employees find most productive for work.
More of the InformationWeek article from Rob Preston
In a nutshell: The ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices has changed the way many enterprise users deploy technology, with an ever-increasing body of employees now bringing their own devices into work with them. The enterprise, meanwhile, focuses on ensuring its data is available securely to these devices. So, how prevalent is this trend really?
I’ll skip the potential cost savings; relative to the extent of your enterprise, a move to mobile devices in replacement of PCs will indeed save a little cash, but this will quickly be eaten up by the IT departments need to make data available and secure.
A global Forrester Consulting study, announced in September last year, confirmed BYOD is part of today’s discussions, noting that of 546 organizations looked at, two-thirds had seen end-user interest in BYOD policies (PDF).
Also interesting: 20-22% of businesses already support employee-owned laptops, tablets and smartphones. An additional 16-21% of enterprises intend enabling such support across the next two years. In this they’re driven by an interest in helping employees become more autonomous in providing their own tech support. Some are chasing that holy grail of cost-saving, but I’m not convinced they’ve fully thought through the process.
Take desktop virtualization; 21% of the survey group are prioritizing desktop and application virtualization above any moves to upgrade their Windows installs. The impact here should be to make an enterprise completely platform- and device-neutral. This should be a good thing. Another 29% of firms are standardizing around Windows 7 and desktop virtualization.
More of the CIO.com article from Jonny Evans
In this era of cheap-and-reliable rent-a-data centers, does it make sense for a company to build a new data center on its own anymore?
Amazon’s data center guru James Hamilton is pretty clear that he sees no reason for most companies to keep constructing new data centers from scratch, but if they have a huge compute load and really have to, they should build way more capacity than they need and sell off the excess a la Amazon itself.
While Hamilton has a vested interest in people moving their compute loads to Amazon’s infrastructure, his build big or don’t build at all mantra resonates with several other IT experts. The consensus: It makes sense for most companies to trust their data center needs to the real experts in data centers — the companies that build and run data centers as a business. More companies will start moving more of their new compute loads — maybe not necessarily all the mission critical stuff — to the big cloud operators. That roster includes the aforementioned players as well as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others that are building out more of their own data center capacity for use by customers.
More of the GigaOM post from Barb Darrow
Interesting article from a customer’s perspective on choosing the right colocation facility.
SmarterTools recently completed its transition to a new data center in the Phoenix area. The addition of the Tier 3 data center was integral for the upcoming launch of our hosted services (such as our Hosted SmarterTrack customer service software) and will help us support increased demand for our software.
It was a logical step for our company, but not one that was taken lightly. We realize that many of our customers use our software and services for mission-critical tasks, so the security of their information and the availability of our software and services are paramount.
Choosing the best data center to house our servers and associated infrastructure wasn’t a snap decision. We researched several data center solutions, finally settling on ours after numerous on-site visits and discussions with the data center staff regarding the features and benefits of their colocation services. Based on our experience, we can offer the following tips for choosing a reliable data center:
More of the SmarterTools blog post
What were the major trends in the data center industry during 2011? We’ve identified 10 trends that had a significant impact on the sector. Here’s our list:
1. The Cloud = Business for the Data Center Industry
About once a week I still see goofy headlines asserting that cloud computing is bad news for data centers. The reality, which became crystal clear in 2011, is that the growth of cloud computing means big business for the data center industry. Virtual servers don’t magically float in the clouds. They all live in physical servers, inside data centers. Cloud technologies have driven demand for more efficient data center space that can support higher-density computing workloads. That trend manifests itself in many ways – a hardware refresh, or a data center retrofit, or outsourcing to a cloud specialist, or leasing colocation space or wholesale data center suites. Cloud growth at Rackspace means more leasing for DuPont Fabros, international expansion for Salesforce.com means more business for NTT, and Twitter’s need for impoved latency and redundancy means business for QTS. Not to mention that the data center providers who were most aggressive about moving into enterprise cloud, Terremark and Savvis, were both acquired this year. On virtually all fronts, 2011 was the year in which cloud computing moved from discussion to dollars, and the data center industry was a major beneficiary.
2. Modularity Goes Mainstream
Another technology that saw adoption shift gears was the modular data center. The trend was solidified by a steady stream of announcements of new projects and new customers – something that had been conspicuously absent during the first few years of containerized offerings. It wasn’t just the number of modules, either.
More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller
Cloud environments are driving data center automation and making it more difficult to do. But if you want to free up resources for other priorities, it’s a must.
Shifting spending from IT operations to innovation and meeting business needs more quickly should be key goals for every CIO. One way to do this is with a highly virtualized data center. But IT won’t get the staff efficiency gains and cost savings from virtualization unless it automates more of the work IT does.
The message is starting to get through: 36% of the 345 business technology professionals we surveyed are already using process automation tools, while 32% have an implementation project under way.
Faster response time to service requests is the top process automation impact, cited by 25% of tech pros surveyed who have fully deployed process automation tools. Others cited reduced errors and shifting staff to new activities–which means freeing IT to focus on higher-value projects. Cash savings, though, can be elusive: Just 11% cut staff, and 5% cite cost reduction as a key impact of process automation.
More of the InformationWeek article from Michael Biddick
Here’s a great article from GigaOM and an associated infographic from Emerson Power on The State of the Data Center 2011. Do any of these figures surprise you?
Data Center Infographic from Emerson Power
The figures are mind boggling. Data center strategies are changing, and both wholesale colocation and the cloud are on the rise.
The complete GigaOM article
Chipita America CIO defend food makers use of cloud-based apps, and criticizes many IT managers’ reasons for eschewing it.
Chipita America may be as close to a server-less company as one can find. Its ERP systems, EDI, BI, Office, Exchange and file servers are all hosted in a service provider’s cloud.
About six years ago, when many IT managers were debating Nicholas Carr’s book ” Does IT Matter ,” Chipita CIO Scott Martin was moving the Tulsa, Okla.-based snack food maker’s email to a third party’s cloud hosted platform. Since then Chipita has moved the rest its core systems to the cloud.
Martin said he didn’t see a competitive advantage in managing internal systems, believing that his time could be best spent focusing on business needs.
“The real difference that IT leaders [can make] is being able to leverage information to create competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Martin.
Six years later, Martin is still a pioneer in cloud adoption, and at times is called on to defend and explain the approach to his peers.
More of the NetworkWorld article from Patrick Thibodeau
CIO Michael Saitow can’t divulge the details of his biggest challenge in 2012. Suffice it to say, he’s embarking on a major project at M.S. Walker Inc., a Somerville, Mass.-based wine and liquor distribution business. What he can say with certainty is that the toughest part of the project will be finding the right change management strategy.
“I spend half my time working on projects, and half my time trying to figure out how you get people to buy in on these projects,” Saitow said.
M.S. Walker will produce more than 1 million cases of spirits in 2012. The 80-year-old company does business in more than 30 states and has offices throughout the Northeast. So, what is the challenge for Saitow on IT projects big and small? “How do you make sure that you have done enough research to know what your end community’s requirements, expectations and wants are? So that when you are ready to make the change, it is as easy and painless for them as possible — and even exciting,” he said.
More of the SearchCIO article from Linda Tucci
Political debate in the United States today is highly polarized. Many in Congress are so beholden to the dogma of their political party that they are unable to make rational choices that might even give a hint that the “other side” has a point. The result is that Congress seems unable to act in the best interests of the citizens it is supposed to serve, resulting in historically low approval ratings.
IT is not immune from such polarization. There are, for example, many IT decision-makers who simply swear by open source. They believe so much in the open source model, and have had such positive initial experiences with open source tools, that they have taken the dogmatic position that all of their future software acquisitions will be made from within the open source portfolio.
On the other hand, there are decision-makers who have fully and with little reservation married themselves to proprietary platforms. The support and sense of security they get from platform buy-in has become entrenched in their go-to-market strategy, and the very mention of open source may elicit an actual, audible snort.
More of the Computerworld article from Christopher O’Malley
