Saturday, March 10, 2007

Evolution of the Data Center

As I am looking at the triangle to explain the transformations happening around content, networks, and devices I can't help thinking about the other changes happening in the IT industry. Is one driving or enabling the other?

In the past, I talked about utility or cloud computing and it seems that cloud computing is becoming the new buzz word. It is true that content providers, service providers and network infrastructure manufacturers believe in the same shared network service architecture. Cloud computing meets all the scalability, reliability, flexibility and performance (one could argue with this last one :-) required to deliver these services over the web.

Big players like Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and Amazon are already offering cloud computing services to other companies to run their software. Like email and web hosting in the past, this is not for everyone. Large companies still see their data centers as a competitive weapon and won't let anyone running it outside their four walls. They are using the same convergent infrastructure (server, storage, software) to make their own data centers much more flexible but it will be a while before they transition. This explains the success of VMware ($700M of revenue can't lie).

In the meantime, more cash-sensitive companies will buy computing resources on the web to run some of their software (or buy the service outright from salesforce.com). The data center is evolving to better server the business model outlined in the triangle.