Moving on to the next generation IT

Network World

Financial giant Merrill Lynch is building a stateless data center where it can dynamically combine capacity with operating system and application components to meet its computing needs in real time.

“What we want to get to is someone who comes in and says ‘I need X amount of capacity, I need it for this amount of time, I need it 24 by 7 or I need 20 minutes of capacity and at the end of the month I need 100 units of capacity’ as opposed to ‘I need X number of servers’,” said Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch. “This is the shared utility computing model. It is moving away from the dedicated [server or desktop] idea.”

Very interesting. I wrote a while back that the next generation infrastructure should be one in which the application, the infrastructure follows the sun. In effect, everything runs and is hosted wherever the energy costs or carbon footprint is cheapest at that point in time. For example, during London business hours, my infrastructure might be hosted in New York or Sydney, where my other data centers are my bcp, my disaster recovery. That I might take the Sydney data center down to upgrade the ESX servers, the switches firmware etc, and carry out system maintenance without impact to the business or the end user. Where the IT service, the actual web sites, Citrix applications, in-house applications and workload is virtual, and managed according to the infrastructure capacity, the service level agreements and infrastructure availability.

To achieve this you need 3 key things:

• Understanding the application workload requirements
• Abstract the application from the infrastructure
• Have a billing system, a way of providing, managing and supporting service that works with this - decommission the concept that it’s my server. It’s not - you’re buying utility, workload.