A colleague just put me on to the “I, Cringely . The Pulpit” blog and I just read the “IT Wars” post. The phrase that caught my eye was:
- “The problem is our management of IT hasn’t evolved as quickly as our assimilation of it. We’ll probably still be fighting over who owns IT long after the IT resources, themselves, become effectively no longer ownable, except in our corporate minds.”
This statement has been resoundingly true ever since the first vacuum tubes came to light many years ago. Even today, as VMware, Google, and Amazon push towards enabling cloud computing, the capabilities to understand the performance and availability of cloud-based applications is poorly understood, and will continue to be this way as the underlying infrastructure becomes increasingly complex (and the management tooling continually struggles to catch-up).
It is wishful thinking that computer systems will be able to manage themselves, ultimately because we humans, as operators, will continue to subvert them. This is especially true in the case of virtualization, because, as Cringley mentions, we are close to being able to deploy the majority of business applications within a virtualized cloud (whether it’s in-house or not is a different discussion) yet, we are somehow unable to distance ourselves from the concept of physical ownership. In discussions with Cameron Haight (virtualization analyst) at Gartner, it shocks me that departments in large organizations subscribe to using VMware or other virtualization technologies, yet want to split physical infrastructure by department. Ultimately, because they do not trust the infrastructure to be shared or managed properly — whether automatically or manually.
Additionally, the human management of these environments is never going to be done by “A” players, and there will always be a requirement to engage in deep root-cause analysis by varying levels of skill sets. The widespread deployment of VMware is proving this. As Windows environments are virtualized, the very skill sets of Windows technicians are being rendered obsolete because of the Unix nature of VMware (perhaps this bodes well for Hyper-V’s adoption). So how are these people supposed to manage complex environments as their capabilities are being tested?
I don’t foresee a panacea solution in the near future (and I think most experienced IT individuals gave up many years ago), so where does this leave us? I am a strong believer in “single-pane-of-glass” solutions, whereby all necessary data about an environment (virtualized or not) is available for forensic digging, quick real-time analysis, and identification of dependencies. Ultimately, since we are responsible for our own undoing in the technology space, at least the evidence should be laid bare for future discovery.
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