It's a data center, not a development center

Last week, I listened to Donna Scott of Gartner describe some interesting poll results from the Gartner 2007 Data Center conference. The point that struck me most was that the largest percentage of respondents said their application teams, rather than IT operations teams, are responsible for deploying their applications to the data center. I'm not really surprised, given the complexity of deploying .NET and Java applications, which are the technologies used by over 70% of the respondents. But I can't help but wonder how much development productivity and operations staff utilization is being lost in these cases. How can application teams maintain a steady deployment pipeline of business application functionality if developers must change hats to deploy new or updated applications, manage deployment environments and respond to deployment and configuration changes? How can the IT operations staff efficiently manage their data centers when they must rely on and wait for the development team to solve their operational issues?

I'm sure some enterprises would say this is just how IT works. I say it doesn't have to. Certainly these teams have to work well together. But try as they might, if the application platforms don't support automated deployment facilities, then the teams will continue to fuss over fragile scripts that are developed and managed by the development team and are often poorly understood by the IT ops team. Furthermore, beyond initial deployment, runtime factors such as user load, scheduled operations and business priorities will require further changes to the application deployment. .NET and Java are great application development platforms, but they are lacking when it comes to simple, automated management in production environments.

There are some excellent products on the market that address portions of this problem. Server provisioning products from the likes of BladeLogic or Opsware (HP) ease the process of getting applications and updates deployed to the data center. Configuration management tools from mValent or Symantec bring much needed repeatability and control to the configuration and release management processes. But server provisioning and configuration management don't simplify the deployment changes that are required to address runtime factors in real time. Instead, more fragile scripts are developed, more developers are brought in to manage them and more IT staff is stuck fighting fire drills when expected and unexpected system usage strains the statically deployed applications.

Clearly enterprises must free their development teams from managing application deployments if they are to bring true agility to data center operations. The next step would be to replace this manual intervention with the appropriate data center automation products. We certainly would recommend a product like FabricServer that dynamically manages applications based on policy and demand, but enterprises should make their choice based on their business, operations and staffing requirements. The faster these changes are made, the faster the applications teams can get back to focusing on development, and IT ops teams to managing a robust real time infrastructure.