Take a step backwards with hardware?

Since I first got to play with a ‘commercial’ computer (my Spectrum and Commodore 64 don’t count) I’ve seen massive changes in devices and tools available to an IT user. I used to have to try and get time on the Amdahl in the basement but then Desktop PCs became the de facto standard, soon to be followed by laptops and tablets and Blackberries.

The devices I use today make my life so much easier – more functionality, more power, more portability than I could have dreamed of back then.

Behind the scenes things have changed rapidly too. IT infrastructure moved from the corporate office into external data centers managed by third parties. Now we have the rise of virtualization technologies and the rapid growth of Cloud Computing that will allow greater flexibility in IT infrastructure design and utilization than ever before.

Would I buy my next laptop if it wasn’t lighter, faster, more powerful or more flexible than my old one? No I wouldn’t.

So ask yourself the question – Would you want to embrace these new IT developments, knowing that you were actually going to be worse off?

Would you invest in virtualization technologies for your company or look at how Cloud Computing can be utilized to benefit your business unless it will offer you cost, operational and functional advantages? At the very least you would want to retain all the functionality your current infrastructure offers.

And yet some companies are willing to move to a virtual or cloud environment and lose all the sophistication provided by their Traffic Managers (Application Delivery Controllers to some of you) because hardware Traffic Managers can’t make the move into those environments.

I’ve seen lists of questions that you should be asking your cloud provider but I think the first question to ask is “If I move my infrastructure, or even just part of it to a virtual or cloud environment will I have the same view of my traffic, and the ability to manage it, as I did before I moved?”

Putting aside all the other physical vs virtual or cloud arguments (capex vs opex, scalability, flexibility etc) you wouldn’t want to take a step backwards now would you?

Nick Vale

Comments

[Frank]

On the subject of load balancing, why not get the highest availability while not getting caught in high prices? Kemp’s got some great load balancers that are low priced and high in quality:

http://www.kemptechnologies.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=pv&utm_content=zs&utm_campaign=home

[Nick Vale]

I'd be really interested to know how Kemp hardware can be deployed within a virtual or cloud environment or do you have a virtual appliance?