Your life in the virtualized future

The virtual job New skills required Specialize - to a point 7 dos and don’ts

It's 4:45 Friday afternoon at your Boston headquarters, and you're itching to head out to tonight's 2009 World Series game between your Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. You deserve a victory tonight as much as anyone in the city. You've just finished rolling out the latest Microsoft-SAP Business Suite to 20 business units across the country, a project that also meant migrating several Linux servers to the newly released Windows 2009 operating system .

Checking your e-mail one last time, you discover Microsoft  has just issued a patch covering critical vulnerabilities in Windows 2009. No problem. You download the patch, and it automatically gets tested for your environment and against the new Business Suite. Assured that the patch won't break anything, you hit another button and roll it out to the servers. By 5:15, you're on the train to Fenway Park.

Far-fetched? Not as much as you might think at first. Over the next five years, new data center  technologies such as virtualization, Web-centric computing, on-demand computing and autonomic computing will become entrenched. Network professionals then will find themselves free of the more mundane tasks that today fill their days, and they will be ready to tackle more strategic projects - faster and more efficiently.

The virtual job

"It's already happening here," says Paul Theisen, IS director at The Tech Group, a manufacturer of plastic injection molding in Scottsdale, Ariz. "We already have application and server virtualization, and we've had virtualization of the disk and storage environment for quite some time. Eventually, we'll reach the point where we'll literally have virtualization of service levels. And suddenly, we'll have virtualized just about everything the data center offers."

That's the point feared by many of today's IT and network staffers. After weathering the dot-com bust and the down economy, will they have survived only to virtualize themselves out of a job in five years?

"That's a misconception about this technology," says Bob Venable, manager of enterprise systems at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee in Chattanooga. "It's not that you don't have anything to do anymore, but that it frees people up from drudgery. Yes, they're deferring a bit of control to a tool, but it frees them up to do the more strategic things they should have been doing all along if they had the time."

BlueCross says it has saved $1.5 million per year through more-efficient use of its storage capacity and less downtime by using McData's SANavigator storage-area network management software and IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager. The company also recently implemented IBM's SAN Volume Controller virtualization software to further reduce data management costs.

"With virtualization, we spend a whole lot less time fighting fires and far more time thinking and planning strategically," Venable says. "People are able to do better projects - more of what they're paid to do. They're still in their same roles. They just spend less time on the mechanics of storage and more time thinking ahead."