Data center designers should take a page from the High Performance Computing (HPC) market.
I have always enjoyed talking with my mate Andy Patrizio, about all things tech. I recently had a chance to talk with him about standardization in the data center. He wrote up a great article on the how IT should approach uniformity, with some interesting case studies from Zynga and Southwest Airlines, and viewpoints from Peter ffoulkes, senior analyst with TheInfoPro (a division of 451 Research) and myself.
Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, said he agrees with ffoulkes to a point. “I think it’s a good idea, a best practice, to standardize on a hardware build and hypervisor,” he explained. “It reduces the fragility of the environment and gives you the opportunity to have stability. But there are a lot of real world circumstances where it’s not a good idea. The cost is one. Do you need the same system for every workload?”
In such a case, one size might not fit all. For example, paying $1,500 per VMware license for all environments might end up wasting money.
Andy had some great insight of his own, and I had a lot more to say, as did ffoulkes (yes, I checked and it his last name is intentionally all lower case; and no, I don’t know why). You should read it at its source – Why Boring Data Centers Are the Best (Slashdot).