Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

A Glimpse into the Data Center of the Future

Recently I was asked to give a talk  to one of our partners about the Future of the Data Center.  Now there’s a broad topic!  The industry has been talking about the "Future Data Center" for decades and there have been many definitions of what it will look like.  I see the Future Data Center as a "lights out", service delivery operation.  This Data Center will provide compute and storage services and do so autonomically based on workloads and service level agreements.

Until recently though this vision was impossible to implement.  The Data Center was a fairly static place where modifying resources to support business applications took hours if not days to accomplish.  Providing true service levels was impossible, IT managers didn’t even know how to define a service level let alone implement one. 

The adoption of virtualization technology changes that though.  Compute, network, and storage resources all become very dynamic and modifications to these resources can happen in real time or near real time instead of the hours and days it would take in the past.

Two other key pieces of technology have evolved that will make the transformation of the Data Center complete.  One key technology is autonomic elements.  In order to provide true "lights out" operation elements within the Data Center need the capability to "self heal" and automatically provision based on changing requirements.  Recently Xiotech announced their ISE line of storage arrays.  This storage array has the capability to predict when drives are becoming problematic and re-calibrates the drives before issues arise.  It also has the capability to self heal using it’s "Spare-In-Place" technology.  This is the first autonomic storage array I’ve come across and I’m sure you’ll see more vendors going down this path in the future.  Of course this technology will become easier to implement as we adopt SSD’s (Solid State Disk) and obsolete the spinning rust we deal with today.  I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

The last piece of technology that is needed in order to realize this Future Data is what my friends, Ellen & Richie Lary, calls the DCRM or Data Center Resource Manager.  They describe the DCRM as

performs several important policy-based functions, utilizing the various system management utilities available in the data center as its eyes and hands.  The DCRM maintains knowledge of what resources are available to allocate to applications, and schedules an application for execution based on priority and the availability of appropriate resources.

Beyond providing policy-based functions I believe the DCRM needs to also offer a rich set of Analytical and Modeling capability in order to truly manage the Future Data Center.  A policy engine alone can not provide the dynamic, system level knowledge that the DCRM requires to make it’s decisions about which resources to deploy and when to deploy them.  Another aspect of the DCRM is that it needs to not only respond to current conditions but also must have predictive capabilities.  In this new paradigm IT service providers have to have an insight into the future needs of the business.

Akorri’s BalancePoint is a good example of a DCRM.  BalancePoint provides the necessary visibility across all layers of virtualization and with a rich set of analytics and modeling is able to identify trouble spots and make recommendations about future service capabilities. 

All three technologies, virtualization, autonomic elements, and DCRM can now be combined to offer a true Future Data Center.  My prediction is that you’ll see the first "service based" data centers rolled out in the very near future and then the real excitement begins.

May 1, 2008 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | 1 Comment 

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One Response to “A Glimpse into the Data Center of the Future”

  1. gateway edi  on January 21st, 2009

    Dynamic data centers. I think you are on to something here. Nice photos by the way!

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