In a relatively short piece today, Michael Vizard has managed to cover a lot of ground. He deserves plaudits for his concision.
Quoting Ashish Nadkarni, a practice lead for Glasshouse Technologies, Vizard’s salient point is that while vendors, notably Cisco and HP, are pushing data-center convergence with fiery ardor, enterprises have not responded with reciprocal fervor.
Resistance is Manifold
The resistance to data-center convergence is manifold. CFOs are wary of anything resembling forklift upgrades accompanied by substantial capital outlays. Meanwhile, CTOs and CIOs are leery of stumbling into vendors’ trapping pits, drawn by the promise of long-term cost savings into a dungeon of proprietary servitude.
Last, and definitely not least, there is cultural and political resistance to sweeping change within IT departments. This makes perfect sense. Any student of history will know that revolutions displace and supplant power structures. The status quo gets pushed aside.
If we think about data-center convergence, we find that many potential enterprise-IT interests are threatened by its advance. As Vizard has mentioned previously, IT departments long have had their specialists. They are staffed by high priests of servers, viscounts of storage, lords of networking, and a smattering of application wizards.
Kumbaya Falls on Deaf Ears
By its very nature, data-center convergence entails that all these domain masters work in concert rather than in isolation. That scenario has theoretical appeal, and many salutary benefits could result from such IT kumbaya and common cause.
However, human beings — particularly in a realm where their positions are subject to offshoring and where job security has faded into a bitter, mocking memory– can be forgiven for eschewing collective idealism in favor of realpolitik calculations of personal survival. In their minds, questions abound.
If the data center is converged, what happens to the specialists? Who benefits, who wins and loses, who emerges from the fray with a prosperous career path and who becomes a dead man walking? These are uncomfortable questions, I know. But you can be sure many people are asking them, if only to themselves.
Answers Needed
An integrated, unified data center, with across-the-board automation and single-console manageability, has its charms — some of which are undeniable — but not necessarily to the specialists who inhabit today’s enterprise data center.
Cloud computing, whether of the private or public variety, faces many of the same issues, though the public option addresses the CFO’s concern regarding capital expenditures. Then again, cloud computing is challenged by the same cultural and political issues discussed above, and by other inhibitors, such as nagging questions about security and compliance.
I know these issues have been discussed before, here and elsewhere, such as by Lori MacVittie at F5’s DevCentral. Vendors, especially executives ensconced in boardrooms eating catered lunches, tend to overlook these considerations. Their salespeople, though, need cogent answers — and they had better be the right ones.
Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds 