“Wikibon believes that successful enterprises will be aggressive and early adopters of a mega-data center strategy.”
David Floyer, Co-Founder and CTO, Wikibon

David Floyer only writes about major shifts every couple of years but as most will tell you when he does, successful CIOs listen. His latest report, available online here essentially boils down the next big shift to “start planning and moving to a mega-data center now”.

This is not just a hype thing, it’s a fact.

His report presents a compelling argument for all medium-to-large organizations to move their entire data center infrastructures to IaaS mega-datacenters (AKA Wholesale Data Centers) within the next ten years, if not sooner.

In his piece he describes the key challenges faced in today’s data center topology:

• Stove-piped islands of application infrastructure.
• Stove-piped IT organizations with separate groups of:
  • Application development,
  • Application maintenance,
  • Database administrators (DBAs),
  • Server infrastructure operations,
  • Storage infrastructure operations,
  • Network infrastructure operations.
• Slow connection to public cloud services (which are mainly used for development and edge applications).
• Poor integration between cloud & legacy applications.
• High-cost operations, slow to change.
• Great difficulty optimizing to meet application SLAs.
• Very expensive and difficult to enable real-time analytics.

He goes on to point out that, “Overall IT is perceived by most business executives as inefficient, high cost and very slow to change. Line-of-business executives are exerting pressure to use external IT services to achieve their business goals.” The problem he sums up as this sort of pressure, combined with executives seeking primarily SaaS solutions will end up with a hodgepodge of systems and data that will continue to be difficult to secure and expensive to use and maintain.

Why Mega-Data Centers?

In the report Floyer goes into to greater detail but the highlights of why he believes in mega-data centers are:

• The cost of IT Infrastructure is at least 50% lower
• The cost of implementing & managing IT infrastructure is
  up to 80% lower
• Backup-as-a-Service
• Disaster Recovery Services
• Security Services
• Big Data allows the value of enterprise applications
  to be vastly increased

His major conclusion; “CIOs and CXOs should aggressively adopt a mega-datacenter strategy that fits their business objectives within their industry. Enterprise IT should exit the business of assembling IT infrastructure to run applications and the business of trouble-shooting ISV software issues. The focus on IT should move to positioning the enterprise to exploit the data avalanche from the Internet and enable real-time analytics.”

Once again, as if CIOs don’t have enough on their plate, more proof that it is network infrastructures, the rise in importance of the data center and cloud technologies pushing the CIO to center stage in the C-Level drama.