Over on the application side of the house, enterprises are embracing the service-oriented architecture. That means they're allowing application components to be shared across an enterprise, even pulled from external parties, and assembled in a loosely coupled way. This could mean trouble in the data center, as SOA's flexibility translates into unpredictability. As Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst, says, “You better have the capacity to support that one service and have planned for that scaling from an infrastructure perspective -- hardware, software, network, bandwidth and storage." Foundational technologies to support SOA include server provisioning and configuration management, server virtualization, and run-book automation. Experts recommend these and other technologies be combined in a service-oriented infrastructure. With SOI, they say, companies can move from dedicating infrastructure resources for each application to allocating resources dynamically using virtual processing, storage and network resources.
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