The end of the data center (newsletter)

This is the last edition of this newsletter, and I wanted to revisit the major themes that have dominated it for the last couple of years. Although we ranged far and wide, to be sure, we wove our growing tapestry around a few central threads.

First and foremost, more than anything else, we spoke of the data center’s growing pains, of how IT is dealing with problems of space, and of power consumption and heat generation. Whether it was discussing the implications of virtualization for power management, or simple cooling aids to stave off massive HVAC upgrades, we examined these very physical aspects of the data center more often than anything else.

Second only to the physical data center was the emerging virtual one. Virtualization - whether of servers, of security, or of desktops - occupied our attention again and again. The drive toward virtualization on the server side, the distantly trailing echo of that in the bare outlines of a virtualized security infrastructure, and the recent swell of interest in providing virtual desktops as a service out of the data center, all grow out of the enterprise’s rising needs for greater agility and scalability, and for “extreme uptime” and more robust business continuity.

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This is the last edition of this newsletter, and I wanted to revisit the major themes that have dominated it for the last couple of years. Although we ranged far and wide, to be sure, we wove our growing tapestry around a few central threads.

First and foremost, more than anything else, we spoke of the data center’s growing pains, of how IT is dealing with problems of space, and of power consumption and heat generation. Whether it was discussing the implications of virtualization for power management, or simple cooling aids to stave off massive HVAC upgrades, we examined these very physical aspects of the data center more often than anything else.

Second only to the physical data center was the emerging virtual one. Virtualization - whether of servers, of security, or of desktops - occupied our attention again and again. The drive toward virtualization on the server side, the distantly trailing echo of that in the bare outlines of a virtualized security infrastructure, and the recent swell of interest in providing virtual desktops as a service out of the data center, all grow out of the enterprise’s rising needs for greater agility and scalability, and for “extreme uptime” and more robust business continuity.

After virtualization, we have most often discussed information stewardship - holistic data management in the enterprise - and its implications for the data center. Topics included continuous data backup and virtualization for business continuity, data quality management and the storage explosion.

Fourth, we discussed many aspects of data center operations and management, ranging from new metrics for assessing data centers to the proliferation of management tools to the interplay of staffing and the physical data center. We have been especially emphatic on the need for greater and better automation in provisioning and management to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of systems administrators.

Lastly, we spoke fairly often of security and identity management. We have been much concerned with the adaptation of security to an increasingly mobile and virtualized world, and to an IT environment in which there is no perimeter but the perimeter around each individual system.

Overall, the message was that in the face of changed and ever-more-rapidly changing demands, the data center as we had come to know it in the “old days” (e.g. the '90s) has met its end. The old data center is giving way to the new, more agile and responsive but denser and hotter and far trickier to manage and secure.

And so we come to an ending too. My colleagues Andreas Antonopoulos and Johna Till Johnson and I have had a wonderful time exploring this frontier with you. Thank you for all your comments and questions, and good luck in all your data center endeavors. Although this newsletter is done with, we will be continuing our work on the evolution of the new data center - please join us at Nemertes Research to see the latest.

Editor's note: To keep you abreast of data center news, starting the week of Aug. 13, you will begin receiving the Data Center News Alert newsletter, which mails every Tuesday. We thank you for supporting Network World newsletters.