Tuesday | 2 December, 2008
Time to Get Real?
There are three strong reasons why real-time infrastructure isn't practical yet: It's almost impossible to make a business case for it; it's not yet technically feasible; and vendor licensing agreements have not kept up with the technology
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SIDEBAR: Are You Mature Enough?
When plotting a course to real-time infrastructure (RTI), it's useful to know the stages to go through on the way. Gartner has identified seven stages of IT infrastructure maturity:
The first stage for most enterprise's infrastructure is basic unintegrated and incompatible sets of servers, often dotted around the enterprise (one server, one application). Next comes centralized infrastructure, where servers are picked up and shipped to one or more centralized locations (fewer servers are used as pot plant stands). Disaster recovery and backups are usually done with more rigour once someone who knows what they are doing is charged with doing them.
The third stage is standardized infrastructure. There are fewer types and versions of hardware and software, which reduces costs. The fourth stage is rationalized infrastructure with even fewer boxes and less software (more sharing and fewer duplication and inefficiencies).
Stage five sees a virtualized infrastructure where applications transparently share processing and storage, using a virtualization layer. In this service-based infrastructure, components are managed as end-to-end services to meet service-level agreements. Virtualization relies on products such as VMware's ESX Server or Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 to fool applications into thinking they have a server to themselves. The sixth stage on the road to real-time infrastructure is service-based provisioning, where rules engines allocate or de-allocate resources depending on demand.
Finally, there's RTI itself. A policy-based infrastructure where services are automatically and dynamically allocated to business processes, according to business policy rules.
At present, most enterprises' IT infrastructure is moving from basic to centralized and standardized. The final two stages - service-based infrastructure and policy-based infrastructure - will be fully achievable in the future, as key technologies mature. As one vendor said recently during their RTI pitch: "Our software does let you run on full automatic pilot, but I wouldn't do it. It would be like you holding a gun to your own head."
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