Let's Get Distributed

George Bernard Shaw once said, If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.”

Pithy as always, GB, but not necessarily true, is it? We can learn from experience – even with something as complex as a large enterprise data center. And clearly, we frequently benefit from the experience of costly deployments that failed.

The data center needs to be an asset that effectively leverages enterprise applications, computing resources, and the latest technology. However, traditional data centers were built to run standalone applications with dedicated computing resources. This ultimately limited the effectiveness and efficiency of the business. That was a mistake that we don’t have to repeat.

In the past, the data center was built as an individual entity, functioning almost separately from the enterprise it supported. This myopic architectural outlook constrained the organization’s ability to effectively leverage the data center as a storage, customer, or application tool.

The impact of this tunnel-vision architecture is perhaps most evident as new distributed applications tax today’s data center. To effectively support distributed and Web-based applications, data centers need an infrastructure that can easily scale, allowing expansion as demand dictates. This sometimes requires the dreaded forklift upgrade. While it runs contrary to every IT manager’s instinct, the forklift upgrade has the potential to ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership.In this data center upgrade, technologies that are designed to maximize computing and application resources, such as cluster/grid computing and virtualization, are critical elements. These technologies help to bring a new level of efficiency, resilience, and access to the information essential to the business, its customers, and partners.

Building a data center with yesterday’s blueprints guarantees that mistakes will be made. But we’re smarter than that. The pain and frustration of IT managers’ past experiences have provided us the lessons we need to build the next-generation data center – and to get it right.

— Marc Randall, CEO, Force10 Networks Inc.