As the adoption of Cloud IT shifts a rapidly-increasing percentage of enterprise workloads out of on-premise data centers, and as the scale of Cloud increases and improves the scalability and efficiencies of IT usage within enterprises, it’s easy to believe that Cloud IT is inherently “green” and efficient. Recent news and opinion pieces in the business and trade media, including blogs posts and a recent New York Times article, take issue with this assumption.

A recent Strategic Perspective from Saugatuck takes a matter-of-fact look at the situation by examining and describing how, where, and why data centers are inherently inefficient when it comes to power. The bottom line is that on-demand IT requires a significant, dedicated amount of resources waiting to be used, which makes on-demand inherently inefficient on the production side.

On Tuesday, August 28, IBM unveiled the most recent incarnation of the often maligned Mainframe. As has come to be expected, the new machine, dubbed the zEnterprise EC12, includes many technological advances and offers potentially substantial performance improvements. However, this analyst suggests that it is more significant to focus on how the EC12 embodies and illustrates IBM’s ongoing, increasingly Cloud-oriented strategy.

Since the introduction of the System/360 in 1964, the death of the Mainframe has been forecasted by industry pundits for reasons ranging from Mini-Computers in the ‘70s, through Client-Server in the ‘90s, to most recently, Cloud IT. However, maintaining a clear focus on the customer investment in the vast numbers of applications and workloads running on mainframes, IBM has steadfastly evolved the technological and functional attributes of the venerable architecture. From its beginnings as a general purpose platform for all workloads, the mainframe, with the addition of native TCP/IP adapters, became a database and transaction server. With the transition from ECL technology to CMOS microprocessors, the mainframe was able to reap the same technological advances as Intel and RISC machines. Implementation of Linux enabled the mainframe to embrace new “non-mainframe” workloads and provide the same levels of reliability, management, and security that native mainframe workloads have enjoyed for decades.

What is Happening?  On Monday, 30 July, 2012, India’s Northern power grid failed and left over 320 million people without electrical power. Then Tuesday, 31 July, three of India’s power grids (the Northern, the Eastern, and the Northeastern) failed causing a blackout affecting over 620 million people. All power was restored on Wednesday, 1 Aug. These unprecedented outages stopped many businesses that lacked sufficient disaster recovery capabilities and crippled remaining businesses by preventing untold workers from commuting to work.

Why is it Happening?  The precise cause(s) of the grid failures and the resulting widespread blackouts will likely not be known until after a thorough investigation. Further, these outages did not impact Mumbai (the major financial center) nor did they impact Bangalore and Hyderabad (the major centers of outsourcing). However, these outages should serve immediately as warnings to business executives worldwide that “stuff happens” in the form of unscheduled disruptive events. These disruptive events range from terrorist attacks, to failures in major utility systems, to socio-economic, to political, to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, etc.

What is Happening?  On 23 July, 2012, VMware announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, Inc., a pioneer in software-defined networking (SDN) and a leader in network virtualization for open source initiatives. Saugatuck views this acquisition as “legitimizing” and accelerating the nacent trend toward abstracting the definition of network connections above the level of traditional network switches and routers.

Why is it Happening?  For about five years Saugatuck has been alerting clients to the challenges and benefits of virtualized infrastructures (389STR, Real or Virtual: All Infrastructures Must be Managed, 24Sept2007). Saugatuck views SDN as the next logical step in the evolution from traditional infrastructures consisting of dedicated physical devices (e.g., servers, storage, networks) to virtualized/abstracted and dynamically provisioned resources (e.g., memory, processing power, data, transmission bandwidth) which characterize the Boundary-free Enterprise™.

On 11 July, 2012, Saugatuck attended participated in a briefing hosted by Laura Voglino, VP of Routes Transformation, in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. The focus of the briefing was on IBM’s progress in securing independent application solution providers as business partners for their PureSystems family of offerings.