Channel Tech Center

Although the economy may have just started to recover, there have been some fundamental advances in data center technology driven by virtualization that all the major system vendors are in the process of addressing.

Just this past week we saw Cisco line up with VMware and EMC to create pre-packaged sets of offerings for the data center called Vblock Infrastructure Packages. A day later, HP outlined a Converged Infrastructure strategy built largely around its own offerings, and then Intel partnered with Liquid Computing to create the equivalent of a virtual data center in a box.

Meanwhile, Dell has partnered with eGenera to gain the same type of capabilities, Sun has the foundation for a similar strategy in place based on a unified fabric strategy for the data center, and IBM has been talking about the need for a new integrated approach to the data center for awhile. There are also relative newcomers such as Intelicloud that compete head to head with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in terms of having a similar architecture.

In short, what is happening here is that all the major vendors are now battling for the hearts and minds of solution providers as they gear up to take on the next major evolution of enterprise computing. Those set of advances are based on a concept called data center convergence that leverages advanced virtualization technologies to better integrate server, storage and networking resources, while simultaneously providing the ability for application workloads to dynamically migrate across multiple data centers.

The basic idea here is that we can lower the real cost of enterprise computing by automating more IT management functions in a way that improves the productivity of the IT staff, and reduces the number of people it takes to actually operate the data center. At the same time, these new system architectures are designed to introduce much higher levels of flexibility into the enterprise by making it easier to provision systems quickly, but at the same time they also introduce more complexity and volatility in terms of managing virtual machines that can now move at a moment’s notice.

From the customer’s perspective, there are a lot of benefits to these approaches. But many of them simply don’t have the IT maturity required to take advantage of these systems. And many IT specialists within the IT organization may resist these types of server architectures for fear that they put their jobs at risk.

From an economic perspective, some of these approaches are also financially difficult to get behind no matter how much the long terms savings might be. The Cisco UCS approach, for example, amounts to a fork-lift upgrade of the data center that can cost well over $2 million.

The good news for solution providers in the channel is that we’re at the beginning stages of a major transformation of the data center that creates major opportunities. He difficult part is going to be holding your customer’s hand for the next several years as they go through the pain and agony of a difficult process that will change not only their technology infrastructure, but the culture of the IT department and the way the business interacts with IT.