Simplify

There is a lot of talk about 'simplifying' in enterprise data centers. Much of the language focuses on 'simplifying management'...a phrase so common that I believe it has lost effectiveness.

Simplification should make things easier, take less time, and over the long term, save money. So how do we get there?

Data center environments today come with many more requirements than just implementing a new technology. Once customers understand the benefit of a data center solution, the next questions that arise have to do with power, space, and cooling -- the real world critical issues of delivering technology services. It is ironic that with the ability to do just about anything with cool software, as an industry we still face the same energy and space issues as the non-IT parts of our economy.

One way to think about simplification is to create configurations that deliver the utmost in performance and reliability while keeping the overall amount of equipment to a minimum. Less overall equipment means positive ripple effects for real world requirements...lower power needs, fitting into less space, and an easier time cooling the equipment room in the face of a scorching hot summer and increasing energy prices.

A recent article in InfoWorld presented an interesting take on the power grid:

The power grid is similar to the Internet but with a kind of reverse Metcalf’s law. Instead of becoming exponentially more valuable as the number of users increases, it becomes exponentially more volatile as the number of users increases. The hotter it gets outside, the more users crank up their AC, putting that much more strain on an already peak-loaded system.
-David Margulius, InfoWorld, 8/11/06

Simplifying configurations will help keep real world requirements to a minimum, but we also need to create solutions that take less time to administer. I'm specifically referring to the time required for a skilled IT professional to architect, plan, operate, maintain, troubleshoot, fine tune, and provision a data center service. These tasks, often lumped into the general category of 'management', need to get simpler as well. We'll take a closer look at this in future posts.