Next Generation IT Initiatives

Written by Julianus Yu

These are IT initiatives that are driven by the organization’s CIO, IT manager, and data center personnel, to ensure that the business-level objectives and goals are enabled by the data center and network infrastructure capabilities and capacities. Among the next generation IT initiatives we can count data consolidation, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Virtualization, convergence, real-time enterprise, and more.

Data Center Consolidation
In order to significantly reduce costs, enterprises are moving to deploy less data centers, each consisting of more services, by centralizing the business’s applications, servers, hosting, and management. In addition, data center consolidation also enables organizations to meet regulatory and compliance, to drive globalization and to enable business continuity.

Data center consolidation generates clear advantages in terms of simplifying operations and reducing management activities, such as synchronization, backup and more, as from the business perspective it is more straightforward to control and manage 4 data centers than, say 15. However, data center consolidation increases data center complexity and capacity requirements as there are more applications deployed on fewer services and they are accessed by more end-users.

From a data center and network infrastructure perspective, this growth in transactions and applications sets additional requirements that need to be addressed such as:

• More storage is needed

Higher capacity switches, routers and ADCs are required
-   Highly performing
-   Higher port density

• 10Gbps connections are required due to growing bandwidth

• Greater dependency of the application and servers on the network infrastructure

• Multi-core servers to process are required for growth in transactions and applications

• Fast response time although the network infrastructure becomes more complex

• New, on-going scalability requirements

Service Oriented Architecture
Customers are moving to use modular and more granular services in the data center in order to increase agility, improve productivity and to be able to deploy new services and interact with partners much more quickly. As a result, services can be effectively reused inside the data center, as well as quickly integrated with partners’ services in order to create more value and improve the competitive edge of a business. The de-facto architecture used to enable these advantages is known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA uses several modern technologies such as Web Services, XML, SOAP, WS-Security and more.

Virtualization
The virtualization market is evolving from one centered on server consolidation to one characterized by the attainment of a service-oriented IT model that can accommodate business drivers. IT organizations initially approach virtualization with the intended goal of achieving significant capital and operational cost savings within their data centers. Deploying virtualized applications or servers benefits in direct cost reduction by reducing the number of servers, other equipment and the cost associated with them. At the same time, it also increases the business’s agility, as it is simpler to perform modifications in the data center infrastructure – such as topology changes or configuration refinements – in order to be aligned with the business objectives.