IT Organizations: Operating in a world of constant change

The nature of business today is that change is the only constant. Organizations, be they public or private entities, are faced with change as a result of reorganization, business expansion, competition, the impact of new technology, mergers and acquisitions, industry or government regulatory controls and a myriad of other factors.

The reality is that any change that affects an organization will have a flow-on effect to the IT organization.

One can say that an organization’s ability to adapt to change is directly related to its IT system’s ability to adapt to those changes. There are many examples of organizations that have suffered considerable harm to their reputations and market values through IT disasters that resulted from poorly implemented systems, and upgrades that went wrong.

From the release of the first commercially available relational database system in 1979, to support for Very Large Database (VLDB) requirements in the late 1990s, to databases for grid computing environments in recent years -- the last 30 years have seen many important innovations with new server architectures emerging to support mission critical systems.

In the past, customers had fewer choices in server architectures as symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers were almost the de-facto standard for UNIX-based applications. Today however, we witness the emergence of architectures such as blade servers, clutered servers and new operating systems such as Linux.

Back then, moving from one vendor’s SMP server to another was relatively simple as benchmarks could be conducted to ensure that the new server would deliver the required performance.

Today, customers looking to migrate from a UNIX SMP architecture to a Linux architecture based on blade servers are faced with a significantly more complex task. The potential for errors is higher and this can lead to decisions that bring on disastrous results.

Data centres have changed fundamentally in the way they look and operate with the introduction of grid computing. From silos of disparate resources to shared pools of servers and storage, organizations cluster low-cost commodity servers and modular storage arrays in a grid.