Day 1/ Session

IT (R)evolution

Divyesh Shah, Global Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems India Pvt., Ltd., stated that economic turmoil fuels innovation creating an innovation revolution

Starting with the famous quote ‘A crisis is a terrible thing to waste’, Shah said that what business users want and usually get is rarely a win-win situation as the IT infrastructure usage system has changed.

He found that there was a need for increased efficiencies and managing cost and this had induced change resulting in the adoption of a cloud architecture, BI and data warehousing tools, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), virtualization, VoIP/unified communications and outsourcing.

According to Shah the real revolution happens with cloud computing, Web 2.0, virtualization, open source software data center and storage evolution. He reiterated that cloud computing is not just hype. It changes everything. In SaaS, applications are offered on-demand over the network; Platform-as-a-service and Infrastructure-as-a-service are where basic storage and compute capabilities are offered as a service. Shah observed that a global network of clouds unified by a set of protocols and software segmented into subclouds and intraclouds would ensure security for predictability.

We are witnessing a Webolution which has been a gradual progression from client-server computing based on a monolithic architecture to reach out to massively distributed tiers, integrated presentation and application tiers where application servers are replaced by scripts with a segmented or federated database backend. He stated that the industry has witnessed the transition of virtualization from the desktop to datacenter while all of the Fortune 500 were using free and open source software which had scaled to become part of every CIO’s IT equation, given the enterprise-class support and variety of interoperable solutions which reflected in the 11 million active installations and 1 million registered users of MySQL. The ZFS hybrid storage pool has been another innovation in storage virtualization and it manages the storage in a single pool with an optimized hierarchy.

Shah pointed that ZFS leverages the attributes of each type of device and function taking full advantage of the enterprise class SATA reliability. From a data center standpoint, Shah believed that server OPEX would soon exceed CAPEX increasing power density to shift the balance of cost.

The evolution, as he observed, has been in the new thoughts in the system design process which allowed customers to operate at any point of their choosing on this curve be it linear or otherwise. The eco responsible processors were driving energy efficiency and inducing datacenter design changes. “The modular datacenter S20 propels high density, eco-friendly design, rapid deployment and game changing economics driving mobile revolution,” confirmed Shah.

— N Geetha