Reasons why you should care

by Dan Woods, CTO & editor, CITO Research

Building on the idea I wrote about last week in my blog (Business Intelligence and the Data Center),I wanted to do some brainstorming about the potential impact of applying business intelligence (BI) to the data center.

Why should anyone care?

There are two reasons that this topic is vitally important. First, I think that IT in general is headed for a crisis. (See The Coming Crisis of IT Management.) The cloud is increasing both the complexity of the infrastructure IT manages and the speed of change. While it is true that the cloud makes some things simpler and easier and that software-as-a-service applications reduce complexity, the footprint of IT is steadily growing. As the footprint grows, more and more assets that support the enterprise are out of IT’s control. Unless IT improves its game, the pace of change will slow down just when it needs to become faster. It is easy to imagine that companies that master the new world of IT will be able to overtake those that don’t. Second, the assets in most data centers are not managed carefully. In this article, we will look at storage. How often do data centers add large amounts of storage rather than take on the challenge of modeling the need for storage and closely tracking usage? Instead of improving storage management and modeling, data centers often load up on billions of dollars in excess storage. Now imagine what will happen when cloud provisioning becomes popular. Will it be carefully managed or not? Do we even know how to manage it? Continue reading »