Bladewatch.com

By Jake Sorofman

Oracle’s bid for Sun has officially sucked the air out of this week’s news cycles.
And for good reason—it has the potential to truly change the face of the IT landscape, pitting Larry of the Emerald Towers against the stalwart incumbents of the enterprise datacenter. This is a story we’ll all follow closely for some time.

In other news this week, rPath announced its plans to redefine application delivery and systems management. Certainly, I’d be disingenuous to suggest that I’m not at least slightly lamenting the timing of our news, which—while, important—may struggle to rise above the din of the Oracle/Sun announcement.

But I actually see an important coincidence in the timing of these events.

You see, rPath believes deeply that IT has lost its way and has become far too focused on infrastructure, rather than applications. As a company, rPath has set out to reorient the world to the notion of application-centric—rather than server-centric system management. In this model, operating system, middleware and tooling are subservient to the application, which becomes the unit of management.

Check out this post which is on the rPath site written by Jake, it’s and interesting read, and raises a point which I sometimes have to walk a fine line between as a ‘blade boy’. Ask any business/application buy, the person paying the bills, you’ll find something interesting:

“I don’t care what platform it is…. It’s got to be high availability…. The cheapest way please…”

I’ve paraphrased a conversation I was having only last week with a head of business unit, when asking him about blades/virtualization obviously it depends on your business, your comfort and exposure to the technology, but as an IT Professional we need to:

• Maintain delivery – avoiding unnecessary outage, protecting and stabilizing the core infrastructure – the network, the storage, the server.
• Maintain a stable platform – configure with excellence in mind, provide a secured, auditable platform ready for business.
• Aid application performance through effective best practice and configuration

The platform, be it a Compaq Proliant from the olden days, a blade or a desktop with 128mb ram, as long as it works, it’s stable and delivers, the rest is just noise.  Does IT energy efficiency matter? Does what platform you choose, x86/SPARC/Power etc matter? The operating system? To the end user the guy pressing submit no. But these kind of questions do underpin the ability of IT to deliver a ‘stable core’ for grid/hpc or application virtualization, but crucially END USER DELIVERY.

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