by Dave Cappuccio | May 20, 2011 | Comments Off
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Infrastructure Operations and Management conference coming up the 2nd week of June in Orlando. At a time when every IT dollar counts, our 5-track agenda provides the strategic guidance and pragmatic recommendations needed to demonstrate the business value of I&O as you meet the challenges [...]
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Category: Data Centers IT Operations Tags:
by Dave Cappuccio | May 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
Over the past few years, data center design has shifted away from the traditional idea of building out large expanses of IT-ready floor space to an era where smaller component-based solutions are the trend. A variety of different options from vendors have been introduced, and the two prevailing trends we see are container-based prebuilt solutions [...]
Category: Data Center Design Data Centers Green IT Power and Cooling Tags: Container, Data Center, Modular
by Dave Cappuccio | March 23, 2011 | Comments Off
When it comes to storage a variety of fundamental changes are occurring, which have more to do with access than growth. Cloud-based alternatives are forcing companies to re-examine storage from a business perspective. If data is not-critical then a less costly cloud platform is feasible, assuming service levels can be agreed upon. Virtualization is also [...]
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Category: Data Centers Tags: Data Center, Infrastructure Technology, IT-Operations-NA
by Dave Cappuccio | January 2, 2011 | 4 Comments
in the area of data center staffing there is both a crisis looming, and an opportunity, for those thinking ahead. The crisis is developing from three directions at once. First, it is becoming very difficult for data center managers to retain their best and brightest staff. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s labor [...]
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags:
by Dave Cappuccio | November 8, 2010 | 2 Comments
There are a few outside forces in the market today which are going to impact Data Centers in a big way over the next 5 years; smarter designs, Green pressures, conquering density and cloud computing. Not surprisingly many data center managers today are trying to figure out how to design and plan for the future, [...]
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Data Center, GartnerDC
by Dave Cappuccio | June 13, 2010 | Comments Off
One of the cruel ironies within data centers is that the one constant within them is the need for continuous change. Locked between the dual forces of applications growth and equipment obsolescence, capacity planning has become one of the critical skills in data centers. Now if we all had unlimited white space to grow [...]
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Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Capacity Planning, Data Centers, GartnerDC, Power and Cooling
by Dave Cappuccio | May 1, 2010 | Comments Off
No, this is not a 2010 version of the matrix management agenda; I’ve been there, done that. However, in an era where everything in IT seems to be consolidating, virtualizing, converging and “cloudifying”, surprisingly few people are talking about our IT staffs and how all this change is affecting them. In all but the most [...]
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Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: GartnerDC
by Dave Cappuccio | September 25, 2009 | 2 Comments
One of the hidden beauties of any virtualized state is the clear disaggregation of hardware and software, the logical separation of traditionally tightly coupled environments, allowing us much greater flexibility in deciding what applications to run where, and for what reasons. This flexibility in and of itself is a good thing, and we all benefit from it, but I suspect that if we’re not careful in how we use virtualization some apparently intelligent decisions today may in fact turn out to be significant problems in the future.
Take for example some of our legacy applications. Not the ones we’ve been living with on mainframes or large Unix systems for the past 30 years, but legacy x86 applications. You know, those early Windows applications written in C or C++ (or even early Java) which now run quietly every day on those older Windows NT or Windows 2000 sever platforms. Like many older applications from the Big Iron days, these are often poorly documented and not designed with the reusable constructs of SOA, but as stand alone, end to end systems.
In many companies these are clear targets for virtualization. They often have stable performance characteristics (few peaks and valleys), allowing a high number of images per physical server. Since they are older applications the platform itself is not likely to change and the amount of enhancements to the application have been minimized over the years.
As newer Operating Systems emerge and servers grow into 8 and more cores there is a risk that these legacy applications will suffer compatibility or performance problems and will require significant and costly retooling. But with development budgets shrinking, or staying stable at best, higher priority projects will most often get the funding over legacy rewrites, so the prudent IT manager will keep these applications running on the older OS’s in a standardized virtual container as long as possible. This costs very little, does not impact the performance or reliability of the application, and gives IT some breathing room before a large, and possibly complex rewrite begins.
Sounds like yet another side benefit of virtualization, and for the near term it certainly is, as emulating older environments on newer technologies has been practiced for years, and the financial benefits are obvious.
However, as the underlying operating systems get older, updates, patches, and support begins to get marginalized by vendors, and eventually formal maintenance support from the vendor will reach an end. At this point enterprises will have another difficult decision to make – to continue emulation of an older application on an unsupported platform, or to begin the replacement (or rewrite) process for the application. Either choice is fraught with risks, costs and business impact, and in many organizations this will not be a single decision, because as we continue this march towards virtualization the number of legacy applications marginalized into self contained environments will continue to grow.
So what are the impacts? In a best case scenario this is just the ranting of a cynical naysayer and we will continue to upgrade and improve applications as needed, and migrate them to newer platforms when appropriate. It’s a non-issue. But the alternate world view is that the beauty of virtualization is that once an environment is created it can run “as is” indefinitely, with little or no attention from the outside. If this happens IT will almost always focus on near term issues, because these issues are what drive us – after all we are a reactive crowd – and when budgets are always tight the funding to fix what isn’t broken rarely materializes.
In the second world view we may find ourselves scrambling to update scores or even hundreds of these applications to run on newer platforms when we are least prepared to do so. This is similar to Y2K in some respects in that these problems are not caused by lack of knowledge or awareness, but just by years of pushing the issue into that low priority bucket that’s so convenient to use during the planning cycle.
Just a thought……
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Cloud Computing, Infrastructure Technology, Virtualization, VMware
by Dave Cappuccio | June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment
This post is response to a question from Allison relating to the series of questions that need to be asked before embarking on a data center build project. Where to begin? In my first post of this series Allison sent along a quick note with an interesting observation; “I found this article very insightful, but [...]
Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Data Centers
by Dave Cappuccio | June 30, 2009 | Comments Off
This post is the third in a series of questions that need to be asked before embarking on a data center build project. How much energy will I need? Great question. Somebody always asks the obvious, especially when there is no way to definitively answer the question. In the old days (you know, 8 or [...]
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Category: Data Centers Food for Thought Tags: Data Centers, Power and Cooling
