Toward an Application-Centric Data Center
Talk to any enterprise CIO today, and you’re likely to find an executive on a mission—a mission with a clear mandate to get IT out of the infrastructure business.
They’ll tell you that IT has been mucking around in the weeds for far too long.
They’ll tell you that time and budget are wasted managing software and physical infrastructure many layers beneath what business lines really care about.
They’ll tell you that infrastructure has no impact on business value—that it’s a costly distraction to what really matters: Applications and business services.
These applications and business services enable the key functions that drive revenue, reduce cost and mitigate risk. Exactly how or where they’re implemented is really a question business lines would never deign to ask. They simply don’t care.
That’s why so many CIOs want to transform the data center—from infrastructure- to application-centric. This application-centric data center abstracts business services from the physical and software infrastructure muck. It refocuses IT on what really matters.
Cloud computing has served as a useful model for this transformation: Compute capacity is elastic, on-demand, and self-service—and, sometimes (but not always), outsourced. IT focuses on building innovative applications and services and defining policies.
While this infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) approach helps address the physical infrastructure distraction, it doesn’t take on distraction of managing complex software.
Of course, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) help alleviate this challenge for more general-purpose and commodity applications. But what about custom-developed and heavily customized commercial applications that, in many cases, represent the business itself? Here, IT is still up to their knees—in the muck.
This is where rPath comes in.
Now, IT can focus on creating applications and business services, letting policy-driven automation take care of creation, provisioning and maintenance of the enabling system stack. The entire stack—application through OS—is self-contained and ready to run in any physical, virtual or cloud environment—internal or external. And, like an organism, the system is self-healing and autonomic—it updates itself based on policies that define how it should look.
I’ve written exhaustively (perhaps exhaustingly?) about the pain of change for IT. In this new model, change is automated and conflict free—when it’s time to implement changes, IT personnel can ease the tension in their jaw and return blood flow to their ever-whitened knuckles.
In this new model, IT gets out of the infrastructure business altogether—applications are set free to run anywhere, and the application-centric data center becomes the new reality for enterprise IT.
It is important to reiterate that this transformation requires a shift in how systems are currently managed. IT cannot wish away system complexity. Even the most sophisticated cloud architecture will not obviate intra-system complexity. Vulnerabilities still need to be patched. Applications still need new dependencies.
Regardless of whether you update the system in place or rebuild the image on the fly—you can’t simply hide this complexity under the rug.
This is why intelligent automation is so important in enabling this application-centric data center. IT can’t focus on everything—nor should they. To shift the focus to applications and business services, the enabling infrastructure must be deeply automated.
If you ask me, the application-centric data center—not cloud computing—is the fundamental IT transformation many CIOs have in mind. It’s about getting out of the infrastructure muck.
But tell me what you see: Is there an application-centric data center on the horizon?
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