Organize to automate

Automation know-how Outsourcing meets automation Organize to automate Grid on the job Danger in the new data center

Open floor plans - where kitchen, dining and living rooms meld together - are in vogue today among home buyers who'd rather have one large space than three distinct walled rooms. Analysts suggest a similar trend in IT departments.

Traditionally, companies relegate IT staff to stovepipes, divided by specialties such as applications, databases, storage, servers and networks. But emerging technologies are spurring companies to question whether greater interaction among these distinct disciplines might be warranted.

One reason is that many of the new technologies making their way into data centers are more cross-silo than previous tools. Current monitoring tools have more of a business-like orientation than their specialty predecessors, for example. They're less concerned with the performance of a single component and more concerned with finding the root cause of a problem and reporting its effect on business processes and end users. "Today's software understands relationships and interdependencies between network, server and application components," says Trent Waterhouse, product marketing vice president at management software maker Aprisma.

Taking advantage of the feedback these systems can provide requires IT departments to rethink how they traditionally purchase and use technology. "People and processes have to be cross-silo before the tool can be effective," Waterhouse says.

Similarly, vendors with virtualization technologies propose to help companies reduce the number of physical servers in their data centers by combining multiple instances of servers and applications on each box. However, really digging into the benefits of such technologies sometimes requires cross-discipline efforts.

Server virtualization technology is changing the way some staffers interact at Gannett, says Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at the century-old media conglomerate in Silver Spring, Md. "I don't think virtualization is changing the relationship between application and infrastructure people. To the application guys, it's still just a server. They have no idea that an application is running on a virtual machine," Kuzmack says. However it could spur the relationship between the server and network teams to change over time, he says. One reason is a feature like trunking. A virtualized infrastructure lets servers take advantage of network trunking, where one server can be linked to multiple networks via a single cable.

But routers usually support trunking, not servers, Kuzmack says. Taking advantage of the feature requires collaboration between Gannett's network specialists - who are familiar with trunking requirements - and server folks.

Some technologies naturally seem to strengthen the alignment of IT disciplines. For example, application traffic-optimization products blur the lines of networking and applications with features from both disciplines working in tandem.