New technologies continue to emerge at an alarming rate that are shaping the data centre, and the future looks certain to be driven by enlarge the demands of the users from a consumers perspective. In today's IT department, the roles and responsibilities are well-defined and structured. Teams are isolated into very specific verticals. Networking teams handle all aspects of the network. Storage teams handle everything to do with storage; server or systems teams, servers.
With the advent of virtualisation, converged infrastructures and cloud computing, this traditional model is no longer valid and the boundaries have become muddied. All of a sudden, you see systems teams touching networking and becoming a lot more familiar with storage. Networking teams are slowly creeping up on storage functions as HP continue to push forward with converged infrastructure.
This convergence of solutions will force IT departments to think twice about their current approach to roles, responsibilities and skills required for new recruits. No longer will we have a storage admin and a network admin and a systems admin. Rather, we will have a datacenter admin. This new role will be the converged role, one that has sole access to the datacenter and is responsible for it from networking to storage to systems.
A converged network will roll in servers, storage and networking in a single rack. Connect a few cables, one person or team configures it, and it is ready to join the private cloud and create systems. Through the convergence of the IT department the age old finger pointing exercise of server teams blaming networking teams will be a thing of the past and should drive the adoption of these new technologies faster than before with less stages in the change control process.
When the unified messaging team requires a server, they will no longer go out and buy one, rack it and stack it; instead, they will request one. When the systems team needs a file server with a defined amount of storage, it will be automatically allocated. System orchestration was a key play from many vendors last year and has become a lot less quieter this year in terms of the marketing hype surrounding these systems, but they have a very strong part to play in the IT department of the future.
Today's model works something like this: The accounting department has a need for a server, so we spec one out, deploy it and charge it back to them. In most cases, however, we just charge them for that server; we do not take into account the space that server needs, the overhead of managing that server and so many other little hidden costs.
Tomorrow's model will be about figuring out what your computing resources are costing you. It will literally be like a menu with a defined price list. You have your fixed-price menu with different profiles that cater to the different applications. High-intensity applications have a preset profile of resource requirements; low-intensity applications have a different profile. Of course, you will always have the "a la carte" choice, but that comes at a price as well.
Can you avoid this change? Possibly in the short term. Long term, technology will force the change for you, even if you don't make it. As new types of hardware make their way into the datacenter, the skill sets and focus of these teams start to blur; networking, storage and systems will no longer seem so well-defined. Your staffing and sourcing decisions will change to accommodate the new technologies. Only then will we truly transform IT into a service organization that sustains itself financially and is no longer viewed as a burden on the business but rather as an enabler of business growth.
And lets not forget chargeback – all this consolidation of IT equipment which in many organisations is often funded from a departmental budget for a point solution will now share resources with other departments; chargeback will become a de-facto tool for many IT departments.