In search of the consolidated data centre

We live in a world of rapidly moving technology trends, and fast-paced consolidation. What will the data centre look like in the coming years, as we begin to deploy these new concepts? The signs are that there is plenty of room for improvement in the way that we manage our equipment and vendors are inventing ways to help us.

We have spent the past few years consolidating servers to virtualise our computing capacity. Some of us have also virtualised storage through the use of storage area networks (SANs). A few people are also starting to address data centre networking, using high-speed, lossless ethernet to run everything from fibre channel through to iSCSI, and virtualised server traffic over the same backbone.

But the real magic will happen when we begin to put all these things together. For example, storage management tools have focused largely on the management of physical units and their support of various logical unit numbers (LUNs) in the past. They haven't particularly addressed virtualised servers. Similarly, the hypervisor management software used to shunt virtual machines around hasn't been developed with storage management in mind. More often than not, administrators will buy separate tools to accomplish these tasks well. 

And then, there are the links that tie them together. Network management software focuses more on maintaining link quality, rather than acknowledging the other two pillars of the data centre environment. 

Atop all this sits the application portfolio, which is what the computing infrastructure is there to support in the first place. And yet, for the most part, the datacentre infrastructure isn't intimately aware of application performance. Just ask the datacentre manager for a service level agreement on email delivery or screen response time, and see what he says.

The consolidated data centre will change this. The idea is that all these pillars become highly aware of the others. Storage resource management software will begin to understand the data that particular computer servers need to maintain performance. Management of the virtualised servers will be tied intimately to application performance. And it will be done, ideally, in an environment where everything has been consolidated, and where inefficiencies and over-provisioning problems have been driven out of the system.

It's a nice idea. Cisco has been working on it extensively as part of its UCS initiative (and annoying server vendors in the process, by muscling into their markets). Conversely, server experts such as HP (with its acquisition of 3Com and 3PAR) and Dell (with its $1 billion acquisition of Compellent, and other purchases such as Equalogic) are muscling into the networking and storage markets. And IBM? Well, IBM has pretty much two of everything.

The reason that these vendors are growing through acquisition and fleshing out their portfolios is because they want to be able to offer all parts of the data centre portfolio to their customers, and they want to be able to integrate them effectively to add value.

Some vendors have gaps in their portfolios. Cisco's home-grown storage presence is non-existent, for example. But in such cases, they are serving the market through partnerships. Cisco and EMC have been in bed together for some time. This gives Cisco access to EMC's storage and virtualisation expertise, while EMC gets to embrace Cisco's networking prowess.

This idea of a consolidated, high-performance data centre, in which storage, servers, virtualised operating systems and applications all talk to each other over a single, standardised high-speed transport layer is utopian, but deals and partnerships such as these show that the vendors are committed to making it happen. It will take a while to emerge, especially as cash-constrained companies still reeling from the financial crisis are unwilling to rip and replace legacy equipment.

IT professionals working in these environments would do well to watch for this coming trend. It will change the required skill sets necessary to tackle administrative tasks in tomorrow's data centre. Will your CV reflect what is needed?