Jiri’s Notepad

During the last year, I had an opportunity to get up to date on what is going on in the datacentre technology space. I also managed to speak with few people who actually run datacentres for living which was a good reality check. Obviously, the big idea in this space that everyone is moving to is utility computing. But how are people getting to it is different - depending on where they start from.

On one side, there are massive investments by Google (and Microsoft) pushing somewhere towards cloud computing. On the other side, there is the story of traditional IT departments - a story of organically grown data centres and server rooms with a hodgepodge of platforms, databases and middleware, that are close to their power capacity limits and choking on the cabling that remembers the cold war.

It will be interesting to watch the race between these two. I am guessing that to be competitive, the legacy corporate datacentre world needs to achieve flexibility and lower cost. Consolidation and standardisation is the starting point for this, but once that is done, there’s a lot of new datacentre technologies such as virtualisation, application grids, provisioning, CMDB, automated discovery that can help move the traditionalists closer to the utility/cloud vision.

(Photo by John Charleton)