* Technologies that could improve operations in the coming year
Starting a new calendar year prompts everyone to reassess what matters. For IT management professionals, the assessment must include a look at technologies that could improve operations in the coming year.
Network World recently looked at technologies that could change the landscape of IT in the next 12 months, one of which focused squarely on management. Application dependency mapping (ADM) products do exactly what the name states: map dependencies among applications. The information detailed in such maps can help IT managers better manage application performance and ensure they have the appropriate infrastructure in place to support business demands.
This discovery technology goes beyond compiling a list of simple components to generating a map of how the components interact and rely on each other. Network managers equipped with that information can more easily prevent performance problems from reaching users and prioritize work around the most critical applications. For early adopters, ADM means getting a complete picture of the application and infrastructure components in their data centers and how they work together.
“The data center was basically invisible to us and we wanted to make it visible,” says Jacob Hall, vice president of platform and design for Wachovia Corporate and Investment Banking in Charlotte, N.C.
With green computing becoming all the rage, IT managers are hearing from higher-ups about saving some cash with power conservation technologies. Industry watchers argue that most IT efforts around green computing will be to save money rather than save the environment, but it certainly can’t hurt to get starting by slashing energy consumption in the data center.
For IT managers, a logical place to start is with desktops or other client machines. Partners Healthcare last year started to save more than $2 million annually in electricity by shutting down machines when not in use. Analysts expect 2008 to bring more tools that conserve power and energy in the name of green computing — that in reality work best as cost cutters.
Forrester Research’s principal analyst James Staten says in 2008 data center managers will be tasked with “energy auditing,” which involves understanding the entire power path from the utility to the CPU. While vendors will paint such efforts as green computing, companies are more looking to cut costs. “Being green is not the main driver for trying to conserve power. It’s a cost-driven measure for IT,” he says.
Also this year IT managers will have to sort out how they plan to manage heterogeneous virtual server environments. While companies won’t be virtualizing everything just yet, the trend toward virtualizing servers, storage, desktop, applications and even network resources will continue to grow this year. And as more vendors look to enter the virtualization market, IT managers need to get a game plan in place to tackle managing the flexible data center components. To start, managing virtual servers will become a priority.
The market is going to see the need for a heterogeneous virtualization management platform that we haven’t seen up until this point,” Staten says. “It will cause a significant shake-up in the management space when start-ups pop up, and bigger players that haven’t been doing a very good job will look to acquire them.”
