At Gartner’s Infrastructure
Operations & Management Summit 2014 Milind Govekar, a Gartner managing VP,
summarized 10 trends expected to impact data centers in the next five years and
how to prepare for these trends. Writer Meredith Courtemanche’s article,
featured on DataCenter.com, highlights these trends below.
With more than 15 years working with data centers
Elarasys Worldwide has a few additional thoughts to accompany Gartner’s
anticipated trends. Comments accompany each of Govekar’s points.
Ten IT Trends through
2017 and How to Prepare
ORLANDO, Fla. -- The mega trends
coming to data centers over the next five years seem daunting -- infinite
infrastructure, relentless business demands and a major shift in control -- but
there are ways IT pros can prepare.
People on the business side expect the
company's internal data center infrastructure to have the same scalability and
cost of Amazon Web Services' cloud, according to an attendee at the Gartner
Infrastructure Operations & Management Summit 2014 here this week.
That intersection of leading-edge IT
and enterprise expectations underscores the theme of these 10 trends expected
to hit data centers, as curated by Milind Govekar, managing VP at Gartner:
1. Open philosophies: Open development breaks the data center down into its
lowest-level components, which fit together by open standards. Still, with less
than 2% of enterprise applications designed for horizontal scaling, enterprise IT should avoid lifting legacy apps onto open
infrastructure.
Instead, put new workloads on
building-block infrastructure, and renegotiate your hardware contracts to get
ready for more open-standard hardware and software.
2. Automation: This trend is nothing new, but the next five years will be
transformative for IT automation, from opportunistic to systemic
implementation.
The problem however is IT
administrators love scripts. They love creating the best scripts, fiddling with
scripts that come from colleagues, and leaving little documentation when they
move on to another job. IT automation must evolve from scripting to
deterministic (defined workloads for tasks) then to heuristic design
(automation based on data fed in operations). There are banks today that use
heuristic automation because they have all the hardware that you could want,
Govekar said. But they lack the ability to automatically place workloads that
best at any given moment.
Start down the heuristic path by
appointing an automation leader in IT, automating script discovery and
rewarding administrators for building resilient, structured scripts.
3. Software-defined everything. Software-defined means the control plane is abstracted
from the hardware, and it's going on with every piece of equipment a data
center can buy. Software-defined servers are established, software-defined
networking is maturing and software-defined storage won't have much impact until at least
2017, Govekar said.
Don't approach software-defined everything as a
cost saving venture, because the real point is agility. Avoid vendor lock-in in
this turbulent vendor space, and look for inter-operable application programming interfaces that enable data-center-wide abstraction. Also keep in mind that the
legacy data center won't die without a fight.
Elarasys: Just like “Internet of Everything,” this is an evolving concept that ties
into automation and open platform at the hardware level to avoid vendor lock in
and streamline SDN in the OSI model.
4. Big data. Big data analysis is used in a number of ways to solve problems
today. For example, police departments reduce crime without blanketing the city
with patrol cars, by pinpointing likely crime hot spots at a given point in
time based on real-time and historical data.
Build new data architectures to handle
unstructured data and real-time input, which are disruptive changes today. The
biggest inhibitor to enterprise IT adoption of big data analytic s, however,
isn't the data architecture; it's a lack of big data skills.
Elarasys:
Put the right staff into place
and secure more efficient and automated tiered storage. (IBM’s Storwize is now rated #1).
5. Internet of Everything. Is IT in charge of the coffee pot? If it has an IP address and
connects to the network, it might be.
Internet-connected device
proliferation combined with big data analytic s means that businesses can automate and refine their operations. It also means security takes on a whole
new range of end points. In data center capacity management, Internet of Everything means demand shaping and customer
priority tiering, rather than simply buying more hardware.
Build a data center that can change,
don't build to last, Govekar said.
Elarasys:
The jury’s still out on how effective these devices will be in the
workplace. Will they really save us money and time? Stay informed so IT can
respond to the devices that make a difference.
6. Webscale IT. For better or worse, business leaders want to know why you can't
do what Google, Facebook and Amazon do.
Conventional hardware and software are
not built for webscale IT, which means this trend relies on
software-defined everything and open philosophies like the Open Compute Project. It also relies on a major attitude
adjustment in IT where experimentation and failure are allowed.
Elarasys: When your internal customers want you to
emulate Google… If your business culture will allow for creativity and your
budget will afford some wiggle-room, anything is possible. Consider a hybrid
cloud with the proper apps?
7. Mobility. Your workforce is mobile. Your company's customers are mobile.
Bring your own device has morphed into bring your own toys. The IT service desk
can't fall behind this trend and risk giving IT a reputation of being out of
touch.
Bring data segregation -- personal and business data and
applications isolated from each other on the same device -- onto your technology road map now.
Elarasys: Another option to consider—a good robust BYOD
VDI solution (say via Android) could help the separation of business and
personal data. The best feature of this option is no business data resides on
the device.
8. Bimodal IT. No one's congratulating IT on keeping the lights on and the
servers humming, no matter how difficult it can be. Bimodal IT means
maintaining traditional IT practices while simultaneously introducing
innovative new processes -- safely.
Take the pace layering concept from
application development and apply it to IT's road map, and find ways to get
close to customers. Bimodal IT will make your team more diverse.
Elarasys:
Bimodal IT is happening now. Reconnect with key stakeholders in your
firm’s business units.
9. Business value dashboards. By 2017, the majority of infrastructure and operations teams will
use dashboards to communicate with the outside world. Govekar made the analogy
of the business-value dashboard vs. IT metrics to cruise ship reviews vs.
cruise ship boiler calibration reports. They serve different purposes.
Evaluate business-value dashboards and
complement them with IT staffers that speak the same language as your business
stakeholders.
10. Organizational disruption. All the trends above feed shadow IT, where the business units
steer around IT to gain agility.
Some IT teams are trying a new
approach; rather than quash all shadow IT operations they find, these companies allow
business users to set up shadow IT for projects and track the performance like
a proof-of-concept trial. If the deployment succeeds, IT formally folds shadow
IT into the organization.
Elarasys: Again, creativity and flexibility come into
play. Shadow IT operations can be effective in accomplishing mutual IT and
business goals if properly implemented and tracked from the start. If they are
a definite part of the future, IT can benefit from these POC-type initiatives.
Software defined datacenter Gartner doing very well for datacenter and support all the uses of big data
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