Over 400 years before Christ’s birth, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus formulated his famous saying, “Nothing is as constant as change.” This basic idea currently celebrates, among other things, also in the form of the fashion term “disruptive” not only at management speeches joyfully primordial. This is especially true of the professional world. Even up to the middle of the last century, many workers were fairly certain that they would continue to pursue the profession they had acquired. Not only is the prospects for reaching a pension currently becoming lower for almost all employees, but also the chances of having the same education and the same knowledge over 20, 30 or even 50 years are very low
Current example: Data centers change
Actually, however, this problem should not be so strong for people who are active in the wide IT environment: in contrast to the traditional professional images, IT professionals have always had to deal with the rapid change. In addition, they could rely on the fact that they were at home in the engineering and engineering disciplines, which were at the forefront of development. Progress in and around IT has always been so fast that employees in the IT departments and computer centers have rarely been able to "rest" their previous experiences. However, these developments have accelerated once again, not least due to the increased use of techniques such as virtualization and hyperconvergent infrastructures, so that the term "disruptive" in its interpretation as "destructive" is also true in the professional and IT sectors Appears
Silo thinking also has to stop at people
At first sight, everything in today's data centers seems to be the same as it has been in the last 10 to 15 years: the traditional IT architecture has not changed very much in the big companies over the time. If you look around, you will find separate silos for servers, network and storage, which are mostly administered and maintained as strictly separate as possible.
Many CIOs, IT executives and administrators are urgently looking for ways to leave this silo culture behind them and are increasingly using software-defined solutions, which is almost inevitably to use, in addition to the all-round virtualization and the use of cloud techniques Such as convergence and hyperconvergence. However, anyone who believes that the use of such solutions and techniques would only affect the infrastructure managed by the professionals and thus require "only" the learning of some new techniques and user interfaces Br>
The use of hyperconverged solutions and techniques will have an impact not only on the infrastructure managed by the professionals, but also on the jobs of the IT team. From the point of view of CIOs and those responsible for the IT budget in companies, the introduction of such techniques into their IT does not only mean that the old silos can be resolved: they also expect a significant reduction in operating expenses. Finally, it is one of the advantages of hyperconvergent systems that they can help reduce the administrative burden. This is especially true for the use of a virtualized infrastructure, but the already existing overhead in the administration of the data center should be significantly reduced. But this also means for the managers, but above all, that it should be possible to reduce the number of places, as these techniques promise much more automation.
The situation in many IT departments resembles the described situation in the data centers: In these departments, too, a kind of "silo culture" often prevails. In which the IT professionals are responsible for narrowly restricted areas such as, for example, network, storage, databases or server systems and are usually only active there. But if new techniques and approaches such as convergent and hyperconverted solutions are used, the ideal situation will no longer be an area of the IT department with dedicated employees who are only responsible for the network, the storage or server systems. This means that IT staff have an overriding responsibility. The reality shows, however, that appropriate training in the direction of a certain generalization of IT management is still far too rare. Here it is necessary for all specialists from the various fields to be active and in case of doubt, "look outside the box".
Thus, a network administrator can hardly afford to ignore the modern developments around SDN (software-defined networking) easily. Of course, the discussion in the discussions again and again reveals that without the physical network, which will continue to need cables, switches and routers in the form of hardware (at a lower level), a network in software. But administrators from all areas will have to live with the complexity of their tasks moving away from the hardware to the software.
This does not mean that all IT professionals in the data centers become unemployed. Requirements such as creating and managing the required VLANs, setting up, modifying, and monitoring firewall rules in and among virtual machines will continue to exist alongside other more complex tasks. On the other hand, tasks such as setting up and troubleshooting workstations and terminals will become more and more automated in the near future. But new concepts and techniques such as DevOps, in which the requirements of IT operation and software development grow together, are increasingly in demand in this context. For the IT professionals, the growing distribution of such solutions can only mean that they also rely on "their conceptual silos" and have to deal intensively with new techniques. This is particularly true of the comprehensive IT management sector, and is no longer the focus of IT professionals who specialize in virtualization.
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