Laurent Seraphin, senior director of product marketing Centrix Software looks at the power struggle within the data centre

Over the last two decades technology has greatly evolved and enabled a radical transformation at the heart of corporate IT - the data centre. Long gone are the days when data centres were solely providing data related services, today they drive both data and application access.  Virtualisation is playing a key role in this, pushing new opportunities for operational efficiency and agility.

Virtualisation technologies have over the last couple of years reached a tipping point both in terms of technical maturity as well as market adoption.  The cost benefits of server virtualisation need little explaining, for example reduced power, cooling and hardware requirements,  and have been commonly accepted as part of data centre best practice.

Alongside server virtualisation’s role in transforming the storage, compute and network fabrics of data centres, virtualised delivery mechanisms have also transformed the way services are delivered to end-users. Thin applications, streamed applications, virtual desktops and web applications to simply categorise them, are symbolic of a move back to a more centralised corporate IT architecture improving security, reducing chances of data loss, enhancing business flexibility and accelerating the provisioning of IT services at a lower cost. Solutions supporting the end-to-end management of complex data centres are now available accelerating the pace of both server and application delivery virtualisations.

However, with an ever increasing proportion of ‘digital natives’ in the workplace and the need to control user access and device security, there is still a fear for the pendulum to swing right back to the days of fully locked down centralised IT environments.

A happy equilibrium must be found that satisfies both the IT requirements to fulfil a stronger and cheaper corporate IT infrastructure, as well as the end-users requirements to have a productive , workable, and why not enjoyable, IT experience.
Today, most medium and large-scale virtualised infrastructures rely on multiple and often incompatible technologies and vendors. Also, IT services are provisioned from an increasingly wide range of environments: Intranet – data centers within the firewall, Extranet – through a trusted outsourced capacity, and, Internet – with the emergence of Internet cloud computing for example.

This results in a very fragmented and hybrid back-end IT landscape. While very common today, such environments are often hard and difficult to use and navigate for end-users - when they simply need to source their applications and data and rely on IT as a daily utility in order to progress in their work.

With multiple services, access points, application and data publishing mechanisms, different displays and behaviours, the resulting fragmented infrastructure results in a fragmented user experience.  This in turn affects end-user adoption rates, satisfaction and productivity.  In short, achieving greater operational efficiency often comes at the price of a complex and unattractive user experience.

Extracting the data centre value and enhancing the adoption of corporate IT - making it more consumable and productive for users - is often very high on the agenda of a CIO and data centre manager. However, it is a careful balancing act to build what IT needs, as well as deliver what users want. Effectively the challenge here is to make corporate IT more consumable to drive greater and faster adoption.

A first pragmatic step toward a solution is to decouple the infrastructure from the front-end delivery by adding an abstraction layer hiding the complexity of the infrastructure from end-users. This enables IT to aggregate and publish applications, resources and services from fragmented silos but provide a single access environment for the user.
A second step is to simplify the overall user experience. Once the underlying complexity is encapsulated, applications can be delivered more consistently.

This drives greater and faster user adoption and service buy-in, fulfilling corporate IT as user-centric daily utility platform for corporate IT.

Data centre management vs. user experience: Who should win?  Obviously both. As we build greater operational efficiency at the infrastructure-level, making the data centre more consumable should be a key priority.   Those organisations that are able to achieve this balance will deliver lasting value in how IT is developed and used.