By Rich Wellner
Fortune 400 businesses, and many smaller ones, run clusters in many different locations around the world.
As facility, management and other costs continue to become larger and large shares of corporate IT budgets, networking costs continue to fall. The result is that data center consolidation becomes a more reasonable goal.
I've seen this in a few of my customers. Beginning last year people started looking more toward grid technology to help them manage this. As the economy has tightened more people have considered this. Particularly as part of a plan toward cost reduction by moving to open source tools.
The general pattern is that the IT group decides they need to find ways to more effectively manage large and disconnected sets of resources. They turn to grid computing to help them manage that cloud and in the process realize that they have a lot of special purpose machines that are being quite underutilized and that they have enormous duplication of effort in the management of those data centers.
As we've entered into a bear market, many companies are taking a second look at their IT costs and looking for ways to tighten their belts. The combination of open source and grid/cloud computing models offers the ability to do that with open source offering a lower cost software acquisition model and grid computing allowing reduction in IT staff through centralization.
I've also been working with folks on the lost art of environment management. But more on that in a future blog...
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