Let’s take a look at the new reality of IT – a quick survey shows the following:
- Virtualization is now ubiquitous, with more virtual machines than physical.
- The traditional way of running IT – tightly bound vertical technology stacks – has given way to shared pools of infrastructure resources, from which business services are provisioned.
- Thanks to vMotion and DRS, these shared pools are also dynamic – promising automatic workload balancing across datacenter.
- Compute, storage and networking have converged together – with the ability to change resource allocation in real-time.
- Optimizations across the infrastructure stack e.g. page sharing, thin provisioning to provide higher consolidation ratios, and in turn better ROI
- Self-service portals enable end-users to request and provision business services – on demand
- Highly elastic environment scales up or down to meet business needs, and multi-tenant nature raises questions about security and configuration
- Virtual and Cloud admins managing many more VMs than physical servers per person
- CIOs and business owners expecting increased transparency and cost visibility from internal IT to match the cost benchmarks published on the Internet
- Internal IT competing with service providers to host and deploy business services for LOB owners
This is just a short-list of new trends – I’m sure you can provide quite a few more – indeed I’d like to hear from you what else do you see and what’s impacting you.
The big question is how should management evolve to adapt to this new IT reality? E.g. how do you ensure performance and capacity in this shared environment? What about configuration and change management? Do the traditional tools, processes and teams still work for this new model? Is ITIL still relevant in this newmodel? What do you think?
Looking forward to hearing from you, so come join the discussion!
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