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April 15th, 2008 [by Doug Alder]
The will be connecting to a (VDC). The following is from a (emphasis below mine – paper not available online. See here as well for a 2008 interview with , SVP of Enterprise Research at Yankee Group)
Yankee Group’s vision of an ™ is an organization whose employees, customers, assets and partners connect to applications, information and services when and where they need them. Yankee Group’s definition of the Anywhere Enterprise is built on the following five key pillars that will drive data center transformation:
- Consumer technology will continue to lead the way in delivering a personalized IT experience.
- Content will be king as information becomes available everywhere but it needs to be stored and secured in the data center.
- Client devices will continue to evolve, creating an environment where more data will need to be stored centrally in data centers and the end device will become a thin terminal.
- Connectivity becomes seamless, creating a connectivity fabric enabling users to work from anywhere.
- Collaboration will be a key focus as companies look to make key decisions faster by harnessing information from across the extended enterprise.
The shift to an Anywhere Enterprise will bring forth a new era in computing—the virtual data center
Just as it is hard for many of us baby boomers to really grasp and use the technology our grandkids are using and developing today, how it will evolve and around us (see ‘s excellent article on this), so too is it for many in the data center server business to see that the future of s is complete . Nevertheless this is the future. It is a future that all the big software and hardware providers, such as , , , , and many more are planning for. It is also where is headed.There are many reasons for this path, not the least of which are (TCO) benefits and reduced , a factor which is becoming ever more important for corporations as the public, governments and shareholders start demanding better practices. People are becoming ever more connected. As cell phone technology evolves mobile phones have become minicomputers and their capabilities just keep growing. They are becoming thin clients to . This has allowed for an even greater distributed workforce as employees are no longer constrained to working in their office’s desktop environment. This movement puts tremendous pressure on as the work is offloaded from the PC to the server. Enter the virtual data center.Consider a typical data center as it stands today. While the servers may be networked so that they can communicate with each other they each have their own separate hardware resources, RAM, CPU, storage, and those are dedicated solely to that piece of hardware. This leads to both under utilized resources (typical in a traditional data center is between 25% and 35% – source: Yankee Group) as well as maxed out resources and increases the number of physical servers a company must have. This increases a whole range of costs: , cooling, power, hardware, personnel, and so on. The VDC solves these problems.Earlier I said that the big software and hardware companies are planning for a future of VDC. Nowhere is this planning more important than on the network side. Not only does the have to carry out it’s traditional roles, but in the VDC it faces a new challenge; connect all the diverse pools of resources available on the network and create an environment where any resource (RAM/CPU/storage) can be accessed as needed by any device. Obviously this creates a whole separate set of challenges for the underlaying network hardware. To begin with the network must be:
which you can read about in these two .pdf files Optimizing Storage Utilization and ESG Brief Exanet Oct 2007
To achieve those goals requires a whole new breed of network hardware and software. Systems that can be upgraded with no interruption to service. That last point is very critical to the successful operation of a VDC. , for one, is working on it. See their , switches and their as examples.IBM is moving forward with their Big Blue project which is morphing into Big Green and 3-D Data centers. The 3-D virtualized concept is quite an intriguing way of managing IT/Data Center resources
IBM is giving new meaning to the phrase “virtual data center.” And it looks a lot more like Second Life than VMware.Rather than build a virtual world for online gaming or to give users an alternative reality, made a virtual world where IT executives can examine and manipulate hardware running in their very real data centers. The IBM project — called 3-D Data Center — gives IT shops a 3-dimensional, real-time virtual view of their data centre resources, even if they are spread across the globe.”It’s a new way to look at systems and interact with them,” says IBM researcher Michael Osias, the man behind this new idea. “Objects aren’t just visualizations. You can think of them as little machines.”So instead of battling wizards and warriors, data centre administrators get to play with their servers and storage ( compare storage products ). And it does look something like a game, even if it is not one, Osias notes. IBM contends its new technology will help businesses identify underutilized machines that can be eliminated, distribute workload among data centers, monitor power and cooling, and move processing to cooler sites depending on the weather.Using avatars, IT operations executives move through their virtual data centres, viewing “a tailored 3-D replica of servers, racks, networking, power and cooling equipment.”
For a different look at how this is being implemented see this article on Ugo Trade. For the same reason that online 3-D virtual reality games, such as Second Life, became much more popular than the older text based RPGs, adding that 3-D level of abstraction makes managing IT resources much easier. It makes it more intuitive for starters.So you can see the overall sense of the virtual data center, save energy, save labor, save hardware costs, increase , access from via any device, this is the gist of . It is the future fast approaching. Even Google has now opened up its cloud to developers when they announced this month that application developers could beta their new application (if written in Python) using Google’s internal resources, their massive server cluster.When our new is completed Q2, 2009, will be incorporating the very latest in virtual . We have led the way in offering to date with our (DDS) server strategy (easy, worry free, work free upgrades as you grow), the first to offer using Microsoft’s software () and RackForce promises you we will continue to be a leader in the future as well . We see virtualization as the future of computing and we will be pushing forward strongly towards .