Mother of Reinvention

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In this second edition of the Next-Gen IT series, produced jointly by the editorial teams of CIO and Computerworld, we look at the factors driving what can very aptly be described as a reinvention of the enterprise data center. Indeed, that reinvention is born of necessity: the relentless need to drive the business by cutting costs and improving customer service.

It’s clear that the reinvented, next-generation data center will be a bastion of virtualization, consolidation and automation technologies. What isn’t so clear is how best to address the difficulties — and even some anomalies — inherent in their implementation.

Conventional wisdom suggests that virtualization enables companies to cut staffing costs, since there’s less equipment to be maintained in a virtualized environment. Yet many CIOs are finding that those costs actually increase because the environment is more complex and requires more highly skilled staff. Consolidation by means of blade servers may cut maintenance and management expenses, but those savings can be more than offset by the cost of the energy required to cool them. We are confident that our anchor stories in this edition — “Lighting the Path to ‘Lights Out’ ” and “Management: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle”— will spark a valuable discussion of what this essential reinvention will entail. Together with the balance of the issue and additional content available on this Web site (ITNextGeneration.com), they provide an intriguing glimpse into the data center yet to be fully conceived.