Attacking the Global Collision of Complexity
Symantec just published their 2010 data center report. They polled 1,780 IT managers and VPs at enterprises of different sizes across all geographic areas. I recommend giving it a read — it’s easy to skim and they made a number of interesting observations.
Some key findings in that report confirm what we’ve been saying at rPath:
- Data centers are becoming more complex and harder to maintain — A third of IT managers say too many applications and too much complexity is a big or “huge” problem.
- Server counts are exploding across all operating systems — I was surprised to see that even the fifth-fastest growing OS is growing at 14% a year.
- Staffing remains tight — IT staffing isn’t growing to keep pace; at most organizations, it is flat or declining. 50% of organizations report being somewhat or extremely understaffed. And lack of budget is the chief culprit for 80% the understaffing.
So what’s the way out of this collision of complexity? At the data center architect level, here are some must-have strategies (that the big IT software vendors aren’t talking about):
- Deep automation — Doubling or even tripling productivity through image-based provisioning and workflow scripting just isn’t enough. Architects need to go one level deeper and automate the harder problems that are commonly gated on senior IT staff, such as:
- Automatically determining which systems to patch in a maintenance window
- Using change history bisection to quickly and accurately run down the root causes of outages
- Cascading changes down a hierarchical data center model instead of applying changes (manually or automatically) to flat lists of systems.
- Heterogeneous models — For many reasons, IT is changing the underlying platform (app server, OS, virtualization environment, internal vs. external IaaS, etc.) faster than ever. That means that any system build that locks in a particular environment is just going to result in re-work for you in the future. Good system models permit late-binding decisions on everything from OS flavor to physical vs. virtual deployment.
And that’s our product strategy in a nutshell. We’re taking automation to a deeper level than any other vendor, with the first version-controlled, target-independent, hierarchical model for systems. If you’re seeing these problems in your data center, we’re here to help.
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