What Is The Data Center Stack?
Now I like this. I mean I r-e-a-l-l-y like this! Now, you’d have to know a little about my background to appreciate those comments – so for those of you who don’t know me – me let me share a few glimpses into my mysterious past. Back in the hay day of .dotcom and software start-ups – my first entree into the software start up world was in the middleware space. And yes – it was all about having a stack and being able to complete with the likes of IBM, BEA, and others to own the software infrastructure within an organization. Why did companies want stacks? Well, they didn’t necessarily want a stack – they just wanted the capabilities of a stack to solve the integration and interoperability challenges that were slowing down their businesses
The more I look at current data center environments – the more I see the need for integration. Now don’t get flipped out – I am not saying someone needs to design an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) or that SOA should finally arrive at the doorsteps of the data center. It has taken SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) a heck of a long time for IT to understand, expose and deliver these so desired “fined-grained services” so that composite applications could deliver that “WOW” factor to the business side of the enterprise and let those users realize a competitive and efficient business advantage.
What does this stack look like? Is it a software stack?
If you look at the stack – it’s a representation of all the “stuff” you need to worry about in the data center. Call it a blueprint or framework if you will. Data Center Blueprint 1.0! Now why do I like this? Because if the industry adopts and endorses a blueprint, framework or stack (you pick your favorite) then it will create a common language for vendors and customers to communicate. It also allows for the innovation and development of integration solutions to help weave together the various building blocks of the stack. From a vendor perspective – I would much rather share with a prospect “where” and “how” I fit into an architecture than to try and first understand/decipher 20 different customer created architectures.
What’s missing in this diagram? API’s! Imagine if we could over time associate the various API’s for each of these blocks, both to expose the data and the associated metric for that block? Ya! now hat’s what I’m talking about! – That would be a perfect world – wouldn’t Tom? Reality: This is tough – since you’ve got a mix of legacy and new – and some of that legacy is locked down tighter than Fort Knox and it ain’t going no where soon. So yes – definite challenge. It has taken SOA the last 10 years to work its way across the IT application layer – could we ever see a common set of “Data Center Services”? A rich repository of all my power, environmental, server, storage etc… data and metrics - all neatly exposed and available for application consumption? Can you see it? I can – but it is years away.
The proposed framework is a step in the right direction. It could be the core building block stack for the data center. Adoption and endorsement determines fate in any type of effort towards standardization.
Hats off to the Data Center Pulse guys! Good stuff!
