Automating The Data Center

As one of the most financially troubled years in recent memory draws to a close, many IT departments are approaching 2003 with a mandate to keep a lid on costs and prepare for the economy's upturn. As a result, companies are turning to technologies that transform IT operations into virtual data centers where excess server, storage, and networking capacity can be provisioned automatically on demand.

The ability to create a virtual, autonomic environment that makes greater use of IT assets depends on different types of software that can create many virtual servers out of a single server and also intelligently manage these and other servers without the intervention of an IT worker. Making effective use of data-center assets always has been an issue, but it's been exacerbated by the technology build-out of a few years ago, says Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.

"People would be very happy with a magic solution that allowed 1,000 servers to be managed as easy as one server, but that doesn't exist today," Haff says, adding that software developments such as IBM's Project eLiza, Hewlett-Packard's Adaptive Management Platform, and Sun Microsystems' N1 are steps in the right direction. Each vendor's goal is to make the data center easier to manage through software that can summon capacity or processing power regardless of the underlying hardware, operating system, or input/output technology.

Bell Globemedia Interactive, a subsidiary of Canadian multimedia company Bell Globemedia Inc., sees ThinkControl software from IBM eLiza partner Think Dynamics Inc. as a way to control the server sprawl it's been battling for years. "We have two data centers that handle 500 million page views per month," says Huw Morgan, Bell Globemedia Interactive's chief technology officer. As the company grows, it's not enough simply to add "racks and racks" of Intel servers, he says.

Morgan has turned to Think Dynamics to automate IT resource management and has set up ThinkControl software in his company's quality-assurance testing area. Rather than set up an individual server for each Web site Bell Globemedia tests, Morgan earlier this year began using ThinkControl to tie together four Dell 2650 dual-processor, rack-mounted servers running Linux to handle the workload of testing multiple sites. The next version of ThinkControl, due later this month, lets companies run multiple apps on the same virtual server.

Companies also are looking at combined solutions to automate data-center management, Haff says. This means they can use software such as ThinkControl, which starts at $75,000, in conjunction with shared switching devices that tie together data-center resources, such as storage, I/O, and servers via Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or InfiniBand.

Early next year, Topspin Communications will ship a management automation device. The Topspin 360 Switched Computing System, starting at $20,000, will let companies run their IT operations as a utility by routing terabytes of information through their data centers at 10 Gbps. Shared switching technology from Topspin and Infinicon Systems, which in mid-November introduced a similar device starting at $27,000, is the first to offer high-speed InfiniBand connectivity. Switched computing can be used to cluster databases as Brigham Young University is doing to keep its Oracle databases running for students.

The cost of running a data center is going to be a real concern in 2003, Morgan says, particularly in a market that's been hit as hard as telecom. Although he expects ThinkControl to help him manage IT operations, Morgan says it will be a challenge convincing his network administrators that autonomic computing isn't a threat to their jobs. "They like fiddling around with computers," he says, "whereas this encapsulates their knowledge."

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