A colleague asked some of us here: “Does the enterprise data center as we know it needs to change?“

 My immediate thought was “Of course it needs to change!” The typical raised floor data center is filled with isolated hardware running independently managed operating systems. These environments are important for many organizations but are not compatible with the cloud data center.

The parking lot of the typical traditional data center has more infrastructure needed by the cloud data centre than the traditional data center. We can drop containers of computing that are connected in the open spaces of the parking lot — something that can’t be done in the traditional data center.

For the cloud data center there is a need space to have homogeneous environments that can be scrubbed clean during a refresh — another tasks that is almost never done in an traditional data center, since removing a cable can have unintended side effects on the other machines that remain behind.

The big problem for cloud is getting the data to the processing. These new high-bandwidth solutions (e.g. 10GB Ethernet)   facilitate that movement. They also facilitate new, more dynamic configurations of processing environments. The traditional data center was designed around scarce computing resources that are protected from themselves as well as other computing resources. In a cloud environment, the computing resources are fungible as well as fault tolerant and it is the connection that must be maintained. This is a shift in mentality as well as support structure – a fundamentally different driver.