Data Center Dynamics

The data center is undergoing tectonic shifts resulting in slow-moving upheaval. Just as the Earth’s crust requires tremendous force to move small distances, so too does movement in today’s data center. Virtualization is the most significant tectonic shift affecting all aspects of data center operations. Virtualization depth is increasing, though slowly. As virtualization planners move beyond the low-hanging fruit applications, issues such as performance, sprawl, and licensing come into play for higher-order workloads. Even though from the outside things appear to be moving slowly, inside the data center it is a whirlwind of activity because virtualization speeds everything up. Virtualization exposes faulty processes and procedures as staff scramble to work at this speed of virtualization. This drives data center planners to realign the entire application lifecycle—from provisioning to decommissioning—around the agility and flexibility of virtualization. Virtualization is also pushing system and network architects to rethink the fundamental ways in which compute, network and storage come together as convergence occurs—slowly—in both hardware and networks.