Recently, the Royal Pingdom blog released a huge variety of data from various sources. This data paints a picture of the state of the Internet this past year.
As I read these data I was struck by how, from a systems view, there is an inverse relationship between size and simplicity. That is, the larger a system, the more important simplicity becomes to that system – both for the adoption of the service and to the ongoing operations and management. In short, complexity breeds uncertainty and drives up failure risks.
This is true for business and as well as for the infrastructure upon which a business is built. Too much complexity in IT translates into a brittle foundation to the business. With a fragile foundation to IT, the infrastructure must be constantly monitored and nurtured to meet the minimum needs of the business. In short, complexity drives up costs and slows down progress.
We have come a long way over the last decade in IT. Virtualization via hypervisors has helped tremendously. The abstraction of the application from the underlying hardware has enabled a first leg of improvement in both the cost and agility of the infrastructure, but this abstraction does not help bring simplicity, resiliency or agility to the physical infrastructure – rather it assumes the physical servers and network are there when and as needed.
Bringing that same sort of abstraction to the physical compute and networking layers is the next obvious step in the drive to modernize the data center. This is the idea behind fabric based computing. Through abstraction, fabrics (aka converged infrastructure) bring management simplicity to the physical infrastructure of the data center. This ease of management delivers greater flexibility and resiliency as well as a means to further reduce IT costs – which is why modernization and fabrics are top CIO priorities in 2012.
When it comes to compute fabrics, there is clearly strong demand and there is certainly no shortage of products. What’s missing, according to Gartner, is openness – providing customers the ability to create compute fabrics from the industry standard blades they currently use. For us at Egenera, this is why we have been porting PAN Manager to all the major blade server platforms. It’s all about meeting the customer where they are…and this starts with bringing choice in the hardware layer. For customers this delivers the best of both worlds: infrastructure modernization and management without any hardware lock in.
The approach is gaining traction. 2011 was a record year for Egenera and 2012 is looking even better. We are rapidly advancing PAN Manager - adding platforms, functionality, flexibility and scale – all with the sole goal of bringing simplicity to the customer’s infrastructure, through the management of open compute fabrics.