Data Center

TechTarget – Explore the new year’s emerging IT trends

Small data centers, intelligent IT management tools — digital diversity? Catch up on the 10 trends driving IT operations forward in 2019, and how they’ll shape your organization.

Nothing dies in enterprise IT, but the older technologies and approaches consistently make room for emerging IT trends. In 2019, prepare to support serverless computing and SaaS-based workloads right alongside the data center.

These technologies will systematically reshape the way organizations deploy and operate IT workloads. Trends such as global and diverse digital infrastructure, creative IT teams and more present opportunities and challenges for the business and IT staff. These 10 emerging IT trends, outlined by Gartner senior director analyst Ross Winser during the firm’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2018, are poised to change infrastructure and operations in 2019.

More of the TechTarget article from Stephen J. Bigelow

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Hybrid Cloud / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Leadership / IT Strategy / Multi-Cloud — Comments Off
04
Jan 19

InformationWeek- Debunking Three Common Cloud Misconceptions

Combatting the misconceptions surrounding cloud computing requires continuous exploration of new opportunities emerging today because of ongoing cloud technology innovations.

Each organization’s digital transformation is different, based on internal operational goals, desired business outcomes and unique customer needs. Despite specific requirements of individual businesses, there’s an important common denominator in our digital era: the need for increased agility. The speed at which organizations need to perform and transform continues to accelerate – the ability to adjust course in real-time to best serve internal and external audiences is paramount, and best enabled with open cloud platforms.

More of the InformationWeek post from Jeff Canter

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30
Nov 18

IT Business Edge – ERP Entering All Facets of the Economy

Enterprise Resource Planning platforms have been around for several decades. Some people love them, some hate them. What is indisputable, however, is that organizations around the world are being continuously pushed to achieve greater efficiency and faster turnaround, and ERP is a way of achieving both goals.

According to Market Research Engine, ERP is expected to near $50 billion in total market value by 2024, infiltrating tasks as wide-ranging as sales and marketing to distribution management and finance. What’s interesting about the current phase of ERP development is the way it dovetails with a number of other industry requirements besides the perennial need to become more efficient. The rising acceptance of mobile and cloud-based applications, for instance, places greater onus on the need to build more flexible, user-friendly means of support. As well, as business processes become increasingly digital-oriented, ERP brings much-needed intelligibility to complex workflows.

More of the IT Business Edge article from Arthur Cole

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28
Nov 18

ComputerWeekly Survey: Data very fragmented, and that’s a worry for most

Cohesity-sponsored survey finds most organisations store multiple copies of secondary data and worry about the cost and the effect on their competitiveness

Most UK organisations store up to 10 copies of the same secondary data, run four or five different products to manage it, and keep it in up to four locations, including two or three different public cloud storage providers.

Not surprisingly, a majority (54%) are also worried about fragmentation of their secondary – ie, not production – data.

Those are some of the findings of a survey sponsored by Cohesity, which provides scale-out data protection appliances and a data management platform.

The survey questioned 250 UK IT decision-makers as part of a study that also asked 650 of their counterparts in the US, France, Germany, Australia and Japan.

The average number of copies of the same datasets in secondary data held by UK respondents is five, and that came out the same across all countries except Japan, for which the number is seven.

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Antony Adshead

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16
Nov 18

ZDNet – Eight signs you could be automating more of your data center

From Doug – These same reasons may be used to consider outsourcing your data center infrastructure to an enterprise cloud provider.

Organizations with existing data centers can save time and money by adopting automation tools for data center management. Here are eight signs you can do more to lighten your day-to-day workload.

As commodity server hardware becomes more powerful, infrastructure cost (in raw performance terms, such as IOPS per dollar) continues to plummet. As a result, it has become substantially cheaper to largely automate the software side of data center administration. In essence, the era of coffee-fueled IT staff spending their days pushing around electrons in order to keep the lights on at a given organization has ended, as data centers can be automated to manage computational, storage, and networking resources, as well as programmatically handle software lifecycle management and security patches.

More of the ZDNet post from James Sanders

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25
Oct 18

InfoWorld – Serverless cloud computing: Don’t go overboard

The new cry from the big public cloud providers is ‘serverless computing for everything.’ Don’t be fooled

There are lots of big cloud shows coming up, and the core themes will be containers, devops integration, and more serverless computing services, such as databases, middleware, and dev tools.

Why the focus on serverless computing? It’s a helpful concept, where you don’t have to think about the number of resources you need to attach to a public cloud service, such as storage and compute. You just use the service, and the back-end server instances are managed for you: “magically” provisioned, used, and deprovisioned.

More of the InfoWorld article from David Linthicum

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05
Oct 18

WSJ – Firms Brace for Wave of Retiring IT Workers

Pilot Flying J is one firm tackling the talent exodus through knowledge-sharing programs and modernization efforts

Baby-boomer retirements over the next few years could leave companies without the IT expertise required to operate their legacy systems, even as they race to update older apps and shift more workloads to the cloud, industry advisors warn.

Part of the problem is that in the rush to modernize IT systems, many firms neglected to document legacy IT processes or hire new people with a working knowledge of how they function, they say.

As a result, a surge in retirements over the next few years “will leave many large companies with unsupported systems,” said Martha Heller, chief executive of Heller Search Associates, a recruiting firm that focuses on technology executives.

“If you don’t have anyone to support those old systems, you will have major gaps in your infrastructure,” she said.

Without taking steps now, the problem will only get worse, she adds. The total U.S. labor force participation rate is projected to hit 61% in 2026 after peaking at 83.8% in 1996, when the entire baby-boom generation was under 54 years old, according to U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor data.

CIO.com – 8 CIO archetypes: What kind of IT leader are you?

From order taker to business leader, CIO responsibilities vary widely. Learn what role you currently play and how to break that mold in service of improved business value and career growth.

Global business disruption is quickening the evolutionary timeline of the CIO role. Market dynamicsare forcing IT leaders to extend beyond taking orders and delivering sustainable IT systems to massaging digital strategies and driving business outcomes.

More of the CIO.com slideshow from Clint Bouton

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25
Sep 18

TechTarget – What is multi-access edge computing, and how has it evolved?

Multi-access edge computing provides the processing capacity needed to support the increase of ‘things’ at the network edge. But for all its promise, MEC has challenges to face.

Multi-access edge computing is based on the principle that processing capacity at the edge of the network will provide significant application benefits in terms of responsiveness, reliability and security. Despite the increasing number of vendor options, multi-access edge computing is in its early stages, with many potential buyers in the investigation or pilot phases of deployment.

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a network architecture that supports compute and storage capacity at the network edge, rather than in a central data center or cloud location.

More of the TechTarget article from Lee Doyle

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07
Jun 18

InformationWeek – Why IT Costs Keep Rising (and How to Resist the Climb)

It will take a multi-pronged approach for IT organizations to stop the escalation of IT costs.

IT departments have gone through several fundamental changes over the past couple of decades. Today’s technology seems space-aged compared to what was available just 10 years ago, and IT professionals everywhere are just trying to keep up.

Many businesses are seeing their IT expenses, or costs, rise. They’re being forced to invest more in their technological infrastructure and, in many cases, the growing demand of superior technology is driving budgets through the roof. IT costs are expected to maintain this upward trajectory for years to come, and for businesses with already-tight budgets, this seems like an insurmountable challenge.

So why is it that IT costs keep climbing, and what can you do to resist those increases?

More of the InformationWeek article from Larry Alton

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.