Data center management: something like heart surgery?
Oct 2nd, 2007 by Rick Barnard
I read the title of this Network World article and immediately starting thinking about whether a hospital and data center are at all alike. What do you think?
Is a data center like a hospital? Let’s take a look…
Minimal administrative resources:
* In a hospital, healthcare providers are forced to operate under extremely constrained margins and find it increasingly difficult to focus on delivering quality patient care while having to contend with limited resources. The number of healthcare beneficiaries per hospital staff is increasing leading to significant challenges for patient care.
* In a data center, administrators operate under high demands in managing complex infrastructure environments with limited resources. The data center is focused too often on “keeping the lights on” and not enough on innovation. The number of servers/applications is increasing, leading to sprawl without additional management resources.
Remote management is critical:
* Hospitals and clinics are located around the world and doctors need to be mobile, but still able to access patient information, healthcare research, experts, etc.
* Data centers are spread out across large geographic distances, and administrators need access to infrastructure and application information to ensure adequate performance and availability. Being able to manage both remotely is critical and for the data center, virtualization enables that to happen.
Higher expectations for quality care:
* Patients expect the best health care from nurses, doctors and staff.
* Businesses expect the best support and innovation from the data center….when was the last time you were OK with your email being down? Did you feel like you were “dying” if you were not able to connect with your customers, partners, and colleagues?
Have you ever felt that managing change or upgrading an environment within the data center or IT infrastructure was like performing heart surgery?
A data center is continuously getting more complex, with more and more servers (whether physical or virtual), technologies, and systems that require careful management but without additional resources for management. Making changes or upgrading an application without impacting business operations is a major effort for data center administrators. Careful planning and execution is critical for a successful data center “surgery”.
Is it possible that data center management and heart surgery are in some ways alike because both are complex and delicate tasks with many different outcomes based on decisions those in control make? Clearly a life is at stake with heart surgery, but your job may be at stake when managing a data center. Fix the complexity, and data center administration might be more like turning on the water or flipping a light switch. Shouldn’t computing be more like a utility anyway?