Egenera Blog

It’s my turn to blog and there is a lot to discuss.   Let’s start with the notion of a truly reliable and responsive IT function.   As a CEO of a relatively large company, it’s easy to define what the ideal IT function looks like.  I want an extremely reliable systems environment.  I want an environment that can respond quickly to new business ideas or changes in the business environment.  And I want it to be cost effective.  Simple, right?  The answer unfortunately is just the opposite – today’s IT function is very often cumbersome, complicated, slow and expensive.

The next natural  question is,  why?  The primary reason is legacy architectures and our unwillingness to let go. The way today’s complex systems environments super glue together IT hardware (servers, storage, networks) requires them to be unglued and re-glued by IT staff when business needs change.  In larger organizations, when you have the added challenge of involving multiple  departments, this literally takes months - and very often, even longer.  Everyone agrees that there has to be a better way.  Not a new tool or piece of software layered on top of a currently complex infrastructure, but a completely new and innovative way of setting up and managing IT environments.

Solutions are available today, but our legacy handcuffs are holding us back.  It’s time to break away from the cuffs. We can’t afford not to.

One new approach  is to manage computing infrastructure much like what SAN or NAS did for the world of storage.  In the past, the storage legacy handcuffs were called JBOD ( just a bunch of disks).  We unlocked the JBOD handcuffs and as a result deployed a much better way to manage, share and protect data with the introduction of SAN.  Today’s legacy server handcuffs is JBOS (just a bunch of servers) with all the same issues of JBOD!

The business objective is clear - it’s implementing a “reliable and dynamic data center.”  This new world  has some enabling technologies in the area of infrastructure virtualization and automation.  And the key that breaks the handcuffs is  called “PAN” or “Processor Area Network.”  The industry is moving in this architectural direction with nearly every vendor including this in their vision – and a few are delivering it today.  But to implement it correctly, we need to unlock the legacy handcuffs that always, always hold us back. And this means re-thinking today’s hardware infrastructure architecture, how it utilizes our expensive assets including equipment, floorspace and the power it consumes, and the people resources required to manage it, with the goal of creating a dynamic data center that is reliable, responsive and cost effective.  I think most business leaders are ready, willing and able to shed the handcuffs and support a reliable, dynamic data center.  So what’s holding IT back?

Share some of your thoughts or drop me a line by e-mail.