The second day of the Gartner Data Center Conference has been informative. Besides the sessions, I have had some wonderful networking sessions. It appears that capacity planning/capacity management is becoming much more of a hot topic these days.

Not only is Gartner seeing more inquiries, many of the people I have spoken with in different IT operational areas are talking about the necessity of doing more formal capacity planning work. They all agree that the days of throwing hardware at capacity problems are behind us. Instead of over provisioning and continual firefighting efforts, we need to do a better job of planning for the future and spending more time tuning applications and services.

It is very satisfying to see that more and more people are beginning to see the value of the work we evangelize in TeamQuest IT Service Optimization.

Disruption in the Data Center

In the first keynote, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch discussed the “Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center.” They are in no particular order, according to Carl.

• Virtualization in storage

• Cloud computing

• Servers: Beyond the blade

• PC virtualization

• Enterprise Mash-ups

• Specialized systems

• Social Software and networking

• Unified communications

• Value of pods and zones

• Green IT

Additional Highlights from Claunch 

Carl gave us a lot of information, covering all the considerations, both pluses and minuses. I’ll cover a few items just to keep things brief. Gartner sees blade servers morphing into computing fabric where memory, I/O and processor are not restricted for use by a particular motherboard and can be redeployed at will. He states that the problem with blades is that when you outgrow one, that particular piece of technology is useless to you, becoming orphaned. You paid for the capacity and processing capabilities but can no longer take advantage of them. By taking technology to the next step by building computing fabrics, you have the ability to redeploy the component parts dynamically so that you continue to gain value from the asset.

Carl discussed enterprise mash-ups, pointing out how valuable they can be to organizations. A common deployment that we see frequently is linking an internet application to one of the mapping services to help your customers find their way to your place of business. Carl points out that this technology can be important in quickly building robust applications for use internally or externally. It can also help you attract and retain the new generation of digital workers. The challenge will be in managing the technology. Pieces of the application come from a variety or web sites which are outside your control so monitoring and measuring service performance becomes much more critical…and complex.

Sidenote
My last comment for this entry is about Don McMillan, an ex IEEE engineer and now a renown comedian. He gave the second keynote of the day. If you get the chance to see him, I highly recommend it. He had most of the crowd in tears. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much. 

More to come. 

Ron

The afternoon sessions were as enlightening as this morning. John Phelps had a great presentation on Green IT. He started out with the statement that companies were not doing Green IT for environmental reasons, but for cost savings and the environment benefited from the work. My colleague agrees. He went extensively into the topic, including pointing out reasons why Green IT is more than power and cooling savings. He finished discussing using alternate energy sources and predicted future trends in the space. McKinsley Quarterly published an article on this subject too.

The last presentation of the day was Cameron Haight’s “Managing the Virtual Server Environment.” Cameron covered the gamut of management considerations – too many to cover in this blog. He states that virtualization has changed the operations landscape probably more radically than at any other time in IT history, pointing out the benefits of virtual environments and the detractions. Server sprawl is the number one issue for people implementing virtualization and Haight covered options and considerations to control it.

He covered the need for chargeback and the difficulties in implementing and sustaining it. If you have time, watch this chargeback video and tell me what you think.

Cameron closed with staffing considerations, saying benefits will vary widely depending on complexity and individual configurations. He pointed out that 55% of those polled said there was no change in Server per IT Staffing ratios after implementing virtualization. He presumed some of the reasons are that although some admin tasks were greatly reduced, such as provisioning, the complexity of the environment drove greatly elongated root cause analysis times, resulting in no staffing ratio benefits.

 Tomorrow is another day and more reports will be forthcoming. 

Until tomorrow. 

Ron

I’m here at the Gartner DataCenter conference in Las Vegas. It is well attended this year. The top attendee groups appear to be Government, Services, Financial and Healthcare.

The first three keynote presentations were great. In the first, Thomas Bittman discussed The Future of Infrastructure and Operations, specifically oriented towards cloud computing. Bittman made a strong argument that the current migration towards virtualization will ultimately drive processing towards cloud computing. He also made a strong case that virtualization has changed computing as we know it, moving us from a component oriented architecture to one of layers, then on to business. He indicated that non-traditional vendors, such as Amazon and Google, will be providing cloud services. He stated that although they are able to provide economies of scale for small and medium businesses, they do not have the quality of service management disciplines that internal companies enjoy. Ultimately he sees these merging.

For more information on his presentation, visit Rich Miller’s take from Data Center Knowledge.

The second presentation covered data center architecture of the future and was presented by Donna Scott and Paul McGucken. They cover such areas as resiliency, location, and management.  Again, they looked at strategy more as an architecture within which we need to operate. I thought it was a great presentation.

The final morning session was delivered by world renowned author Jason Jennings. He discussed the four traits of the best performing business leaders. It was a great presentation and revealed some surprising (to me) results. The four traits are:

• Turning what they do into a cause
• Let go
• Get everyone in the organization to think and act like owners
• Great leaders are stewards

After listening to him speak, I need to buy his books. He has some valuable information to share.

More to come Later.

Ron