Does IT ever change?

A personal reflection from Martin Scudder – Server Solutions Specialist – Lynx Networks plc . . . .

I often ask myself whether IT concepts ever really change. Are we are just victims of the marketing gurus who are experts at renaming for their own purposes?

A few years ago everyone was talking about Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) which involved the automated movement of data from expensive hardware to less expensive hardware in order to save money and maximise efficiency.

Then we all wanted to be ‘Green’. Everyone wanted to save the planet by using less power and cooling and to do that we needed to use less hardware.

The green message seems to have subsided today and I haven’t heard the phrase ILM for years. Now we are all talking about doing more with less. The universal driver is reduced budgets. Data continues to grow and that growth continues to accelerate and yet we all have less money year on year. How can we do more with less?

We can start by intelligently moving data from fast expensive hardware to less expensive, slower devices, with higher capacity hard drives. Then we consolidate and virtualise our hardware to allow us to do more with less, saving on hardware costs and…power and cooling. It is accepted that most companies’ biggest long term cost is now power consumption. As a result we are all looking at ways to reduce it.

We all agree that we can use less hardware to save money. Using less power will save money. Less hardware needs less cooling which uses less power and saves us money. We spend less on larger capacity devices and that saves us money. We move data as quickly as possible onto this lower cost hardware because it saves us money.

Using less was green, now it saves us money. Moving data around was ILM, now it saves us money. Has anything changed? Our motivations are different but what we need to do hasn’t changed at all. Ultimately we have always worried about making our data as available, accessible and secure as possible. I’m sure in a couple of years we will have a new name for this, but I’m just as sure nothing will have changed at all.

Martin Scudder – Server Solutions Specialist – Lynx Networks plc