The big picture Layer by layer Wrapping it up The new data center framework Driven to a new vision From here to the new data center

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, "What does not destroy me makes me stronger." Well, if surviving the boom/bust IT cycle didn't fry your wiring, you must be feeling powerful indeed. Still, don't breathe a sigh of relief just yet. You're going to need all the muscle, sinew and calluses you've built up to wrestle with the industry-shaking changes ahead.

Major technology suppliers and forward-thinking network and IT executives agree that a new, Web-centric computing model is taking shape. But they don't agree on what it ultimately will look like or what we'll call it. Will it be an on-demand computing world, as preached by IBM? Will it be the grid mania pushed by Oracle, Sun and others? Are we building toward utility computing, autonomic computing, virtualization or something else entirely?

Technology giants such as Cisco, EMC, HP and Microsoft - along with the aforementioned titans - are battling for your hearts and minds. And to the architectural victors will go the revenue spoils in the decade to come. (Need proof? Just consider client/server and the current dominance of the Wintel camp.)

You've got to sort through these lofty visions and study the road maps of your key technology vendors, all while trying to make big choices about virtually every layer of your infrastructure and the applications on top of it.

Don't worry; we're here to help you get a handle on the changes ahead. In this supplement, and several more throughout the year, we'll explore a concept we're calling the new data center. The emergence of the new data center represents a quiet revolution in IT, one that holds risk and reward for you and your strategic suppliers.

Whether the industry ultimately calls the coming years "the New Data Center era," only time will tell. But we offer the concept as a reference point for use while designing your new networked IT environment.

The big picture

Let me explain what we mean by the new data center.

The traditional data center is the core computing environment that hosts critical business applications. The new data center recognizes the increasingly distributed nature of Web-enabled applications and the realities of business-to-business - or extended enterprise - networks. In this new data center environment, applications and resources exist beyond the boundaries of stand-alone devices. Of course, design, security and management skills are required to accommodate that fundamental shift.