Policy-based application management and virtualization: The (missing) key components of data center automation

The ever-increasing complexity of the enterprise data center is challenging IT managers to discover creative ways to manage it, while also keeping costs down. At the same time, many executives worry that the current inflexibility of the IT infrastructure hinders corporate business strategy. Product development, product launches, channel development, and other critical business activities are delayed or even abandoned due to the difficulty and cost of modifying today's information technology infrastructure.

In response to these challenges, major IT vendors have outlined initiatives that help enterprises automate the data center and increase flexibility by allowing resource sharing. Examples include Sun's N1, Computer Associates' on-demand computing initiative, IBM's e-business on demand, HP's adaptive enterprise, and Veritas' building blocks for utility computing.

These vendor initiatives may bear unique monikers, but the underlying strategies are remarkably similar. In each instance, an evolutionary approach is offered that starts with simple data center automation and progresses to an environment in which all resources and applications are virtualized and contain high degrees of self-management capabilities.

To accelerate their ambitious strategies, the major vendors have complemented and expanded their technology and product portfolios through acquisitions. The tempo of such acquisitions by large systems vendors has increased in recent months, with deals totaling nearly $1 billion over the last 12 months. Recent acquisition activities include Sun's purchase of Center Run, which complements the company's earlier acquisitions of Terraspring and Pirus, IBM's purchase of ThinkDynamics, and Veritas' purchase of Jareva.

The recent wave of acquisitions has focused on automating the management, provisioning, and sharing of various data center hardware resources. These are undoubtedly important pursuits, but glaringly absent from all of the current offerings is the ability to dynamically allocate resources to applications based on pre-defined policies and real-time business needs - in other words, the on-demand capabilities of these on-demand strategies. On the evolutionary path of Sun's N1, on demand arrives in phase 3, referred to as policy-based automation; similarly, IBM considers this level 5, dubbed autonomic data center management; and at Computer Associates it is phase 4, otherwise known as business-driven infrastructure management.

As each of these major systems vendors gets closer to phasing in true on-demand capabilities, we are likely to see a new wave of acquisitions centered around policy-based application management and application virtualization. These critical elements already exist in a few startups but are most prominent in Ejasent, a 4-year old technology company based in Mountain View, CA.

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