The datacenter consolidation movement was triggered a few years ago by the need to simplify application delivery and to lower IT costs. The concentration of application servers has many advantages: it breaks local IT silos, it simplifies application maintenance and it unifies business processes. By reducing the number of remote servers, it significantly decreases hardware, software and operation cost. Of course, concentrating application servers from many remote offices and regional datacenters into a single location implies to rely on a WAN able to support a variety of application flows in a secure and efficient manner anytime. Bandwidth increase, MPLS and Internet ubiquity completed by WAN optimization and control technologies proved to be able to sustain this challenge. As a matter of fact, most of large enterprises are accomplishing or have already accomplished their servers' consolidation into one, two or three large central locations.
While Cloud computing can be seen as the next step of datacenter consolidation (collapsing private datacenters of many enterprises in one or a few shared mega-datacenters), I trust we can also see it as a very different animal. Like platform standardization (Intel, Windows, VMware) allowed to build and run efficient while flexible consolidated datacenters, application standardization and SaaS model (Salesforce, MS Exchange, Googleapp…) are transforming the consolidation movement from an infrastructure to a business application standpoint. Scale effect has its own asymptotic limit. What matters to the business is not to have more and more servers in a single location. What matters to the business is to select, customize and manage the right set of applications to run and transform its processes.
Enterprises will pick-up the general or specialized applications they need, wherever they are over the "Cloud". Starting from the application perspective, they will use as many "application-centers" as they have applications – honestly, who cares?
- Virtualization + Efficient WAN à Datacenter consolidation à Efficient IT
- Cloud-based applications + Efficient WAN à Application consolidation + Datacenter de-consolidation à Efficient business
Of course, this movement stresses the importance of the network as a key enabler of efficient business, in a hybrid [IT + network] environment without hard-center. This makes WAN governance more strategic than ever to understand, control and manage this new and open environment.
Relentlessly powered by Moore's law, filtered through the implacable selection of business reality, IT's evolution has not finished its course. Species we're living with right now are just temporary links in a long chain we're discovering a bit more each day…
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