New year, new paradigm

IT DEPARTMENTS are finding it difficult to provide the services required of them today and the pressures of this are manifesting themselves in a common theme  "do more with less". Initiatives to achieve this seemingly impossible goal are aplenty - virtualisation, software as a service, cloud computing, centralisation, webification, and SOA, to name but a few. But these are business-driven and require people and budgets - which we all know are dwindling.

ERIK GIESA

Many companies today have key initiatives without the budget or staff to realise them. A critical gap exists and exposes the need for an intelligent and agile infrastructure to accomplish these objectives. The infrastructure itself must be refocused from network to application, from managing static data centres to delivering dynamic services, from operating in isolated silos of resource, application, and data to a structure of shared resources and tenancy.

The traditional infrastructure model, which is currently filling the gap, is "a rat's nest of inflexibility" and evolved from a world where resources, users, and access methods were under our control; where relationships between users, applications, and data were static and tightly bound. Applications were written with specific terminal layouts in mind. As we added remote and then mobile users, incorporated partners, and strangers into the model, and distributed IT globally, the old model broke down. CIOs are frustrated in their ability to respond to business needs because the underlying IT infrastructure constrains choice, slows response, and limits their ability to manage change. Costs increase, resources aren't shared, and management is complex.

What is now needed is a new paradigm in data centre and networking design that allows the customer, on their terms, to add, remove, grow, and shrink application and data/storage services on-demand. Bridging the gap from traditional to dynamic infrastructure requires decoupling the traditional tight connection-centric binding between users and resources, and replacing it with an intelligent fabric that not only connects, but ensures optimal interaction between users and resources.

Becoming more agile requires a dynamic infrastructure where the components of the infrastructure (network, security, application, virtualisation, software as a service, cloud, etc) are designed with a high degree of re-use in mind and collaboration between teams.

About the author: Erik Giesa is VP, Product Management and Marketing at F5 Networks.