Big Data

Some insights from the 2011 Gartner Data Center Conference

Posted on: December 6th, 2011 by Ashish Kuthiala No Comments

 

The first day kicked off quite early with Gartner presenting top 10 major IT trends and then they had several individual sessions.   Some notes on Big Picture trends:

1. Physical Infrastructure management is becoming very critical.  One stat shared was that one data center could consume many time more  energy than 100 offices that depend on those data center application and services.

2. Compute Fabrics are starting to emerge in the enterprise and it is going to accelerate.  Compute fabrics are also known as Cisco UCS and HP
Converged Infrastructure and refer to the ability for the enterprise to seamlessly add and expand compute capacity that comes pre-integrated with server, storage and networking elements.  Our perspective has been ”Converged Management for Converged Infrastructure”.  If  infrastructure is converging, why shouldn’t management.

3.  Hybrid clouds are going to be the norm.  Hybrid clouds are going to be driven more by need to focus core capabilities within the firewalls and
outsourcing non-essential applications.  This is differentiated than enterprises using hybrid clouds purely for bursting capacity.

4.  Challenges in cloud computing are going to be around integration and security.  Specifically around integration they mentioned that integration costs could get so high that the gains from cloud could often be lost in the integration costs.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

 

DevOps – A big assumption that’s often overlooked

Posted on: November 22nd, 2011 by mahesh 1 Comment


Before I write about the elephant in the DevOps room, I’ll first stipulate the premise – that DevOps is bigger than release management and is a new approach to an efficient IT lifecycle, from development to operations  (http://bit.ly/rqAZ2O).

Given this context, the gigantic assumption implicit in DevOps is that there is such a thing called “Ops”.  In most enterprises “Ops” is actually Server-Network-Storage-Virtualization-Applications-Security… and this is not even the full list.  Today these domains operate quite independent of each other.   We can’t have DevOps without some consolidation of people/roles, process/culture and technology within Ops.  Until there is broad evidence that this transformation is happening we should consider changing “DevOps” to “DevServerNetworkStorageVirtualizationApplicationsSecurity…” to reflect the true scope of the challenge.