A thought about Utility Computing

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Data Center.

Nicholas Carr is Earth's answer to Oolon Colluphid. Everywhere he looks, IT is dying. I expect him to release his new book, "Well, That About Wraps It Up For IT" any day now.

Of course, centralized processing is not the entire answer, either, regardless of where the control lies.

I currently work in support of a highly mobile and global sales force. If they had adopted centralization then they would be neither mobile, nor global. I can tell you through experience that as of this date, ubiquitous mobile networking is a lie.

So we rely on laptops loaded with the one platform that truly "gets" mobility, Lotus Notes. It can act as a thin client when connected, a fat client when necessary, and replicates data as required to make the transition. Is it for everybody? No, but nothing else makes sense for our purposes. In addition to being damned useful, it's a metaphor for the "correct" approach to Information Technology. To wit:

Pundits are all wrong. They want to push people in the direction of some predetermined trend. To the extent that they do this they are disembodied tails in search of a dog to wag. What you should be doing is looking at your business needs, choosing platforms and architecture that actually meet those needs economically, and distributing the business logic to where it actually makes sense and can do the most good (and where failure does the least harm). In some cases this will be at the data center (yours or outsourced); in other cases it will be a laptop, desktop, or PDA. Sometimes it's a mix.

Do that and let the trends take care of themselves. In hindsight you might find that your needs align with some trend exactly. Or you might wind up the visionary trend-setter. Or you could be the maverick who bucks "conventional wisdom" in favor of innovative and profitable approach. In any case you'd have done right by your organization.

Posted by: dave.leigh@...   Posted on: 02/06/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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