Transitioning From The Enterprise To The Cloud

By Juergen Urbanski

The crisis in IT is not about performance or features, it is about complexity.  Complexity makes the enterprise choke on IT operations cost

Performance, in terms of CPU, memory and network bandwidth, is becoming an increasingly abundant commodity that simply gets better, cheaper and faster each year.  The time has passed when any one company can create a sustainable competitive advantage based on hardware alone.

However, there are two scarce commodities that become increasingly prominent year after year relative to the declining costs of the above: latency and human attention.  Latency is forever constrained by the speed of light and the distance between elements of a distributed system.  IT labor does not ride on Moore’s Law either, to the contrary.  As systems increase in scale, complexity increases and more human attention is consumed by the number, relationships and diversity of IT assets in the data center.  Since the number and variety of nodes in an architecture that must be “supervised” by the administrator increases, there are more combinations of things that can go wrong.

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By Juergen Urbanski

This post originally appeared on GigaOm here.

Data Domain today finally agreed to be acquired by EMC for $33.50 per share, triggering payment of a $57 million break-up fee to NetApp. For EMC the buy is very much about “keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.”

Storage efficiency (notably de-duplication) is the enemy of a business model predicated on pushing more disk capacity out the door year after year (GigaOM Pro note, sub required), which is why customers we spoke to would have preferred to see such a disruptive technology remain in the hands of an independent vendor. And where, exactly, does this leave NetApp?

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