Simon’s Blog

In his most recent posts (here, and here) Jonathan Schwartz has been talking on his blog about re-thinking how the IT industry builds data centers.

Companies and institutions continue to spend vast sums of money on “flagship” data centres. You know the kind of thing - huge rooms, with smoked glass windows, and fancy lighting; designed to “impress” visitors. These things can several take years to design and build - but all a data center really is, is a room with computer hardware in, supplied with all the power and cooling the hardware needs.

For many applications, the data center is ripe for industrialisation and commoditisation. Appropriately provisioned, you don’t even need people to run a data center anymore. So, how will it happen, and why is Jonathan blogging about this now? The reason is - Sun Microsystems is shortly to announce a contribution in this area. Called Project Blackbox - it’s essentially a shipping container, stuffed with computer hardware and air conditioning.

It’s a good idea. You can rack and stack shipping containers. And as long as you can get power, water and networking to them, you could put these things anywhere e.g. in parking lots, or on undeveloped wasteland.

But good ideas don’t always succeed, and whether this one will take off or not, I’m not sure. The whole “data center in a shipping container stacked in a yard somewhere” idea will be massively scary to a lot of people working in data centers. You only have to look at some of the comments on Jonathan’s blog to see that.

And, I can tell you from my own experience that this could be a tough sell. One of the things we do is help companies to industrialise their operations - re-engineering their processes; building sophisticated software and robotic systems that do things orders of magnitude faster, better and at lower cost than people could do manually. And I can tell you that lowering costs, while increasing productivity and quality - while being of strategic importance for our client’s businesses - are not always concepts that are well-received by people on the ground. For one thing, they often don’t see the need to change what they’re doing; and, more than that, most people are incredibly frightened of change - they’re always worried how it will affect them personally, and if it will mean they won’t like their job as much, or even if their job will be lost. Boards and senior management teams tend to understand the benefits of these kind of approches much more easily, and they’re not frightened of change - in fact they tend to thrive on it.

So, the bottom line is - I expect CIOs and CEOs to love Project Blackbox - it will enable companies to save both time and money; but I suspect many people on the ground in IT departments will resist solutions like this for as long as they possibly can. The trick may be to seed companies with these things, and make them work well - as soon as people see that they work really well, and don’t ruin their jobs, they tend to get on board pretty quickly.