Fret Not, A Solution Is Here

The fundamental problem of running IT as a service bureau is rigidity; that is because infrastructure is stovepiped, complex, requires hyper-specialization at every element, and has incalculable points of interdependencies. The concept of 'fluidity' is abstract at best. In an ideal world, the data center would simply be a collection of infrastructural resources capable of morphing into virtual stovepipes in turn capable of delivering on the immediate and long-term needs of the business and to be malleable in semi-real time to deal with unknown new requirements or unforeseen events.

In short, data center virtualization is required such that the business no longer needs to be concerned with IT and its idiosyncrasies and IT no longer needs to say no ad nauseam. If the data center were 'liquid', IT could say yes first, bring up the application and pick up the pieces as a background task. Do you remember when RAID first became popular and all the Oracle DBAs demanded that their stuff sit on raw devices? Sooner or later we just said, 'OK,' and then did what was right -- gave them a virtual device and told them it was raw. The benefits they derived, the business derived and the poor IT slob derived far outweighed the little white lie we had to tell. This is the same theory on steroids.

Server virtualization technologies are the first infrastructure layer that begins to enable this reality. By creating a server infrastructure that provides for virtual machines, server fluidity is enabled. Virtual machines can move between physical machines at will and even automatically in the event of failure, new performance criteria, or any other new event or issue. Server virtualization means that at least from the perspective of 'always having a machine ready for the unknown', we can appear fluid.

Being able to provide a virtual server to a business unit on a moment's notice is nice but limited. It doesn't address all the other issues downstream. It is a good start to begin to alter the perception of IT and to close the gap by providing a can-do answer upfront, but it will only slow the back-end problems.

What is really required is to stop the primary focus from being exclusively on infrastructure and begin to focus on what really matters below the business unit application -- the data. The business application doesn't care about infrastructure; it assumes infrastructure can support its requirements. The business unit cares about the data associated with that application, while the overall corporation needs to care about the data from a holistic perspective. Nobody outside of IT cares about infrastructure. IT needs to focus on how the data can be best managed since storing, manipulating, finding and protecting data is the baseline reason for IT's being.

Data virtualization is the next thing. Applications connect to information via infrastructure. Infrastructure change interrupts that connection. By creating a virtual connection between the application and data, we can solve most of today's primary IT problems and re-establish a tighter bond between IT and the business.

Since the business owns the application, it should decide which requirements it needs to perform its stated objective and not IT. IT should own the data, not information, but data. The individual applications create and manipulate that data which becomes information when utilized. When the business unit executes on its own without IT, IT ends up controlling nothing and reacting constantly in a no-win situation.

As long as IT can say, 'Yes, we can provide you a way to execute your application and provide you access to your data based on your requirements,' the business will gladly change its perception and hand off infrastructure and data control to IT.