DATACENTER.NEXT: Envisioning the Future of IT
by Jake Sorofman
These days, there’s a lot of time spent defining cloud computing. If you believe the pundits, its definition remains a mystery—a cryptic riddle waiting to be deciphered.
Personally, I’m not that interested in defining cloud.
What is far more interesting to me is defining the future of IT, which almost certainly embodies aspects of what most people would recognize as cloud computing. Whether the future of IT is cloud itself is a silly tautological question since we haven’t defined cloud in the first place.
What we do know is that IT is facing a fundamental transformation—a transformation forced by technological, economic and competitive forces. Technologically, enterprises are recognizing that IT has become unthinkably complex. Economically, enterprises are under pressure to slash budgets and do more with less. And competitively, enterprises are recognizing that IT has become core to business and the delay of yesterday’s IT creates serious competitive risk.
As I see it, this transformation includes four broad characteristics:
Self-service – Where the corporate IT bottleneck gives way to a self-service function that puts control in the hands of distributed lines of business and application developers who provision and maintain their own compute capacity and application workloads. This reduces IT overhead costs and eliminates the delays that we’ve traditionally been forced to accept.
On-demand – A close cousin of self-service, capacity and compute resources are made available on demand, as required. No more delays waiting for service desk tickets to propagate through the system and manual processes to be coordinated and executed.
Elastic – Capacity and resources are consumed variably based on dynamic changes in demand. Rather than purchasing and hoarding compute resources to the “high water mark” of the demand curve, they are scaled up and scaled down variably with demand fluctuations.
Utility Pricing – A close cousin of elasticity, utility pricing ensures that you pay for only what you consume. Not unlike an electric power grid, this model makes IT more economical by aligning cost with value, enabling business lines to pay for specifically and explicitly what they consume—no more, no less.
Are these four characteristics the perfect definition of cloud computing itself? It’s doubtful. I can easily envision a debate about whether or not virtualization belongs in the definition of cloud—or whether it’s cloud when the infrastructure is owned and deployed internally.
Yawn.
It’s the parsing of this sort of nettlesome nuance that makes the defining of cloud a tiresome affair. In my opinion, what is far more interesting is defining the next generation data center.
That’s exactly what we’re going to attempt to do on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 2pm ET with “Datacenter.Next: An Online Panel Discussion on the Convergence of Physical, Virtual and Cloud.”
Moderated by David Berlind, chief content officer of TechWeb, this panel discussion will combine the perspectives and experiences of noted industry leaders, including:
- Michael Crandell, CEO of Rightscale;
- Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath;
- Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Cannonical; and,
- Dr. Rich Wolski, co-founder and CTO of Eucalyptus.
You’ll be able to actively contribute to the panel discussion by submitting questions and commenting on Twitter at #datacenter.next.
What is different about this discussion is that it won’t focus on cloud as the assumed end state of the IT transformation—we’ve heard that story before. Instead, we’ll focus on the more pragmatic transformation that we’re likely to experience—a blended combination of physical, virtual and cloud environments that function as internal infrastructure and external services.
If you ask me, this blended model is a truer reflection of what enterprise IT will become.
Join us for Datacenter.Next and contribute to new type of discussion on the future of IT.
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Jake Sorofman is vice president of marketing for rPath, the pioneer and leader in technology for virtualizing software applications and managing the complete lifecycle of virtual appliances and application images for cloud and virtualized environments. Learn more about rPath at http://www.rpath.com, follow rPath on Twitter at @rpath and contact Jake at jsorofman@rpath.com.
Please feel free to publish the above commentary in full or in part with attribution according to the Creative Common license, or link to: http://blogs.rpath.com/wpmu/closing-the-gap/2009/09/21/datacenternext-envisioning-the-future-of-it/.
