The data center as an operating system

Companies like Rackspace, VMware, Joyent, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon (among others) are all racing to the next era of computing – the Virtual Era. Hardware infrastructure will simply exist and be provisioned on demand, automatically, and you will only pay for what you use, when you are using it. The OS will be the datacenter, not the hardware, not the racks and racks of servers and storage. Even the network will be virtualized to provide the performance, protocols, routing, and control you need when you need it.
An application development team will simply develop on the platform their employers own or lease, and the apps will run when asked without need for all the traditional wait periods associated with deploying new hardware, services, and capacities. The compute power will be provisioned per the request and scale as the application grows in utilization by the company. The storage will be allocated per the request and can scale up if necessary without much effort other than another request. Storage and compute power can also scale automatically, if necessary, to ensure response times to the end users.
These are exciting times, and how all this magic happens will be fascinating. But in time it will come naturally and IT directors, developers, and users won’t need to know how it happens. They will only need to know what their part is in making it happen – likely a simple request based on the SLA of the owner of the hardware/OS stack. These OS Data Centers are the clouds we are all talking about, the buzzword for the 2010s, or is that the twenty-teens? Where the cloud resides can vary. It can exist in the ether, out there with some service provider like Amazon or Google, or it can live in your own data center running OpenStack, Joyent, or vCloud. It can be a hybrid solution with parts running locally providing the highest possible performance and parts running in some far-off cloud for the ultimate in pay as you go balance. Wherever it is, it won’t matter to the users and it won’t matter to the developers.
What are the big issues to be discussed in the next big futures meeting at your company? Service level agreements, cost per compute cycle or terabyte of storage? Will you debate for hours with your legal team about the liability issues associated with placing confidential company information in someone else’s data center? Will you fret over what it will take to move 500TB of data from one service provider to another in order to ensure a competitive landscape in your procurement model?
Where are your applications running? Where are they going to be running in six months? What about in 24 months? Are you prepared for a time when you have no idea where they are or how they happen to exist?
Learn more about Dell OEM Solutions at www.dell.com/oem.cell phones cell phone spyware cell spy mobile spy