The mission?
To research, spot, and explore trends and their real world impact as they apply to the next generation of IT infrastructure and enterprise computing.
Why this blog?
Because there aren’t many independents covering this space in a holistic way. Plenty of ‘company blogs’ but not so many IT infrastructure people. There are plenty of niche bloggers and evangelists who are super deep in various specialities, such as virtualization, storage, deduplication, data protection, and cloud, but few who are looking at the wholesale change underway for IT infrastructure. At first I thought I was late to the party but upon further inquiry realized the party is just starting…
why now?
There’s a lot of hype in IT, it keeps the spending and budgeting up.
Cloud is hype city without a whole lot of focus or clarity yet. I just look at the vast inefficiencies in classic IT infrastructure versus the radically innovative core infrastructures of Amazon, Google, etc and think the cloud gateway to these architectures will crush IT as we know it for some data types, some types of companies, in many different situations. Labor arbitrage for enterprise infrastructure management could become irrelevant over time if next generation architectures flatten out skill requirements. Why now? It’s timing.
WAN Network architectures are fatter and cheaper. Cheap petabyte scale infrastructures are do-able and you don’t necessarily have to hack together custom built gear and code to make it work. And most importantly you have base of technologies for virtualization, grid, deduplication, all rapidly becoming commoditized, and now cloud emerging as the gateway to super efficient architecture. This is more than just the next wave of Moore’s law and new feature sets or gadget buzz. This is a phase shift.
Why should people read it?
To keep up, to contribute, to challenge ideas, to address a plethora of good questions. Because the whole idea we are used to and for many of us the basic paradigm of distributed computing “as we learned it” and is staple to our entire careers, may in fact be changing. Were talking about 20 years of one model and entering into the next 20 years of the new new new thing. And the practical impacts to us, well that’s really yet to be seen but it’s a fair bet certain roles, functions, and technologies will begin to disappear in the next 5 years as we shift gears into the next 20 year cycle of IT infrastructure.
Who should read it?
Technologists, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, strategists, designers, scientists, researchers, and thinkers who share a common curiosity of what is going to happen to IT infrastructure as we know it.
