Man and the Dog

Infrastructure Support and Services is a big business these days. No company wants the headache of running and managing servers when its not core to their business. You need specialists to mantain, upgrade and manage your servers.

HP perhaps is the best in business when it comes to servers and storage solutions. The way in which they support infrastructure is quite interesting too. Not preffering to having servers across various client locations, they move the customers infrastructure to their own hubs called as Data Centers. These Data Centers are essentially centralised platforms from where infrastructure of various clients are hoisted. The idea of the Data Centers is to manage multiple customers from a single location - economies of scale. A new concept that would evolve out of this the shared services model (hoisting different customers on same server). Which means a 200GB server could be utilised by 3 customers at the cost of one. Interesting concept i think, how far it can be achieved is debatable though.

Whats more interesting though is the fact that the datacenters work on a very thin workforce. I am told that going forward - all you need to manage a Data Center is a Man and a Dog.
A dog to keep people away from messing with the servers and a Man to feed the Dog. This level of automation seems quite scary !!
But believe me we are not far from there.