Not Everyone Needs a Shrink

CHICAGO -- While hardware consolidation is a popular theme in marketing brochures, a panel at the DataComm Enterprise Conference today agreed consolidation is often not an option in reality as information becomes increasingly distributed. (See Clark County, Nev., Kane County Consolidates, and Consolidation's Downsides.)

Users on a panel titled "The Data Center Today and Tomorrow" weighed the benefits of consolidating hardware to reduce costs and improve management against the need to support data spread remotely across a wide range of devices.

Arlene Yetnikoff, director of information security at DePaul University, says it is difficult for universities to consolidate because they serve many user groups -- such as students, faculty, visitors, and distance learners.

"I'm not saying you shouldn't have a strong centrally controlled environment, but universities have never been able to rely on a storage perimeter because we have many perimeters," she explains. "The availability of data is what's important. Where it lives should not be as important to users. It's our job to make sure data is available where the user is."

Even though his organization is quite different than Yetnikoff's, Willie Cumming, director of IT for Strome Group in Santa Monica, Calif., agreed. While DePaul has more than 24,000 students alone, Cumming's investment advisory firm has just 50 employees -- albeit ones with heavy data requirements.Cumming says Strome Group consolidates in areas where it can streamline IT functions, but it's impossible to consolidate everything with 40 of those users working remotely. "As far as our core applications go, most of our people travel, so we haven't been able to consolidate," he says.

Panel moderator Jon Toigo of consulting firm Toigo Partners International says each organization must grapple with whether they will benefit from consolidation of resources.

"We have a bunch of folks trying to figure out how they're going to map technology to their business requirements," Toigo says. "Do we centralize, or do we de-centralize? The trouble with consolidation is that the most important information in an organization is not in the data center. It's distributed data on laptops and other devices."

Toigo's point that different solutions fit different organizations was illustrated in another session today, in which Warner Bros. Entertainment director of technology Harold Shapiro detailed a server consolidation project that he expects to save his company significantly in costs while greatly improving server utilization.

The debate about whether to consolidate or distribute information brought up talk of grid computing during this morning's panel. The verdict? It's not for everybody.Ian Foster, IT director of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., says grids have become a key infrastructure for research because the technology allows groups to access information stored on geographically dispersed systems. "Grid technology is having a large impact on the sciences," he says. "And in my opinion, the technology is going to have a big impact on businesses as well."

Foster points out that Google's infrastructure is built on clusters spread in various sites. "They probably just dont call it a grid."

When asked if he sees a grid in the Strome Group's future, Cumming quickly replied, "No. But I'm open to the Kevin Costner view of 'If you build it, people will bring it to my desktop.' Still, I don’t realistically see us ever going to a grid."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch