Gordon's Blog

a rose by any other name, is still a rose...

The word is out - FabricServer 2.5 is released - and the name of the rose is Real-Time Infrastructure. While this may be a relatively new term, the concepts and IT models that Real-Time Infrastructure encompasses have been around for quite some time:

• utility computing
• on-demand computing
• service oriented architecture
• software as a service
• shared services

All of the organizations and people that I speak to are, in some way, moving in the direction of Real-Time Infrastructure, and they are doing it for a number of reasons:improved service-levels and application performance, increased utilization of resources, and reduced opex cost and complexity. They may not be calling it Real-Time Infrastructure, but that's really what's going on when resources - servers, network, storage - are allocated dynamically to the execution of applications and services based on policies which define the relative importance of the consumer and/or that which is being consumed.

It is important to point out that Real-Time Infrastructure shifts the relevance of virtualization from simply increasing the supply of resources (a la the OS virtualization technologies) to automating the response to the demand for these resources in a manner that ensures that applications and services have the resources they need, when they need them.

Are you building a Real-Time Infrastructure? If so, why not tell us about it! And if not, what's stopping you?

2008: The Year of... What?

Green Computing? Grid Computing? Virtualization? SOA? These aren't the only topics being discussed as relevant in 2008, however they are the topics being discussed the most. Which of these, in the next 11 months and 29 days, is going to impact you and your business?

For me, the answer is "E - All of the Above" :)

Not because they are topical and worthy of thought or discussion or implementation (they are!), but because they are all responses to a common problem manifest in today's data centers: utilization. For as long as there have been data centers supporting the business, the approach typically taken to ensure the *-ilities - availability, scalability, reliability - of business critical applications has been to over-procure and over-deploy hardware in static, siloed, under-utilized configurations.

Clearly, continuing to to do things "the way we always have" isn't an option, not any more. So, here's to 2008: The Year of... Doing Things Differently!