Who will own the next generation data center?
Looks like the next generation data center will have nothing to do with who has the best technology; rather, it will be based on who can do the best job at partnering at the highest level and executing on that partnership to ultimately deliver a solution to the customer. The solution is also shaping up to look nothing like what it looks like today.
Next generation data centers will not tolerate the inefficiencies of today. In the data center of the future, the physical ties that held us back in the past have been cut and nothing in the data center is useless. Business decisions will drive application choices and policies. The applications will provide their requirements to a virtualized platform and the platform will instantly respond. This platform will consist of processors running at different speeds connected by network connections of different bandwidth and protocols to storage and data that spans different storage systems on different continents. All components are disposable and run at or near 100% utilization.
When I was in IT, I purchased a server for an application. Today’s IT professionals need to get ready for a change in consumption model:
- Converged infrastructure will be consumed as a building block. Building blocks will consist of highly integrated servers, networking devices, and storage. Building blocks can be rapidly deployed and rapidly removed without impacting the application.
- Third party capacity will be a substantial extension of the next generation data center. IT consumption of third party capacity (most refer to this as cloud) will come from the likes of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google, Terremark, Savvis, etc.
HP and Microsoft are clearly focusing on the future and putting dollars behind delivering the next generation data center. After all, why give it all away to Google?
