I have a dream….
Which manager wasn’t dreaming about your IT sitting on a beach and the Data center would be completed automated without any human errors ? I believe this is the future. But aren’t we saying this for about 25 years right now. Each year, month, week, day there are innovations that makes our life easier and easier. In the meanwhile we’re getting busier and busier. Isn’t that strange ? We can keep on dreaming or we can take action and make life really easy for the IT guru’s.
Let’s have a close look at the very busy IT guy.
What is his main job ?
Since 2000 I had different jobs at different companies. IT companies, but also at a transportation company. My day to day job was to make sure that the operations were running without any bumps. Some companies bought new technology and the IT had to implement this. Of course it seems working in a lab environment, but during production there were errors. Then we had to work during the nights to fix it. (The transportation company was 24/7 busy) I always was dreaming and thinking about howto change my work into something easy. I prefer to be lazy and innovate instead of working hard and do things over and over again.
To make life easier we bought software and hardware. Now it got complicated ! All kind of GUI interfaces, protocols etc, so in IT we got more and more specialists. Persons who knows a lot of a technology. In a data center you got the storage, network, compute and system administrators. In some small companies those persons can be one person and in large companies it’s possible that the storage guy don’t know the computer administrator.
Am I dreaming ?
Automation AND open interfaces is the way to go to bring back everything to one person who only have to implement new services. No need for “keeping the lights on”. The system will auto heal itself if needed. We’re not here yet, but we’re getting closer and closer.
Cisco got a lot of data center products and they are getting more and more integrated into automation software AND got the capability to auto heal itself if needed. Not only Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) can do this, but also Hyperflex.
Hyperflex can be automated with UCS Director and got the capability to auto heal itself when there is a failure of a node or disk.
Life is getting easier and easier and I believe there will be a day where the IT guys are sitting on a beach and create new services via an app. 🙂
