The Hub Commentary     __

I tend to agree with the increased focus on performance and end-user monitoring and believe it will be driven by the requirement to monitor the service providers as cloud services are incorporated.  Controlled change management with an end-to-end view of the complex infrastructure will work to mitigate risk and both will rely on an integration platform and strategy.

Open Source monitoring for the commodity will also rise in popularity and implementation, but I don’t agree with building more into the monitoring tools or waiting for one vendor to build a single framework.  A single vendor framework is and has never been built ground up to monitor and manage the data center.  The big four all grow through acquisition of many technologies and cobble them together through data layer integrations.  No offense to my vendor friends, I’ve been a product manager for one of them and did exactly the same thing after an acquisition was made – it’s the quickest way to claim integration victory.

I believe we will see data centers leveraging Open Source, Cloud services for both Services (commodity management – ala ITSM tools) and Infrastructure (to test out excess capacity and demand flexibility options); rise in both availability and performance monitoring for new technology and delivery methods; and end-to-end visibility requirements to mitigate risk and speed restoration time.  All of this is solved and future proofs the data center by considering a  sound integration platform and strategy pulling together the physical, virtual, cloud environment into a single view for monitoring, managing and measuring.

Push your suppliers to build the best monitoring/management tools possible and leverage an integration platform to bring the best of your investments together to transform your data center into a service provider.  Oh yeah, 2011 will be the tipping for data center transformation into a service provider – not technology manager.

Michele

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