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The Future of the Data Center

Government Technology summits will explore opportunities and challenges.

The telecommunications industry has undergone a consolidation in convergence of voice, data and video in the Internet Protocol environment. The hardware industry has endured mergers, as shown by Tandem, Digital Equipment, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft -- among others -- are examples of software industry consolidation.

Such consolidations cause data center management to constantly evaluate and evolve their systems and standards to provide a high level of uptime to their users. And of course, the aforementioned consolidations don't begin to cover the jurisdictional consolidation questions of e-mail, servers, databases, and in many cases, multiple data centers.

In recent conversations with data center managers, I have come to appreciate their day-to-day issues and am at least conversant in some discussions they have with their staff and peers.

I have watched the evolution of data center staff with fascination. Applications previously were developed in-house and that was that. Over the past five years, application development shops have largely migrated to application support shops handling off-the-shelf applications. Now I see some shops returning to application development, because they fear being left out when the next wave of consolidations hits.

Data centers also struggle with some fundamental questions. What is a data center's role in today's government? Do we develop applications? Do we simply supply a raised-floor environment and network infrastructure? Do we outsource the entire shop or part of it? How do we handle our rate schedule? What is behind the rhetoric of the open source and Linux debates?

Data Center managers face surviving this constant change and keeping their systems operating 24/7. In the mainframe world, this is not easy, but is regularly achieved. Bringing down a mainframe once per year or less was the standard, and still is today.

The desktop computing world does not enjoy that track record and has quite the opposite tendencies. Security alone makes the desktop environment a challenge. Disaster recovery for hundreds of servers in the typical distributed environment is an uncomfortable thought at best. And the fact is, the vast majority of government data centers have created or inherited extensive client server and desktop applications, and these system users have the same requirements as mainframe users. Systems must always be up and available.

For example, imagine your vehicle is a bus and it stops regularly along its route. At each stop, a few of your current experts get off the bus, and some people get on but they don't exactly replace the ones who left.

Periodically a new person gets on the bus and tells everyone they are now headed in a different direction. Add the challenge of creating staff who are conversant in COBOL, MVS, various UNIX flavors, Internet technology and -- maybe most importantly -- who understand how to think like a client and be a technical expert while remaining a platform agnostic. You have quite a challenge on your hands.

With all this motion and complexity, executives in these organizations do not get much of a chance to breathe. There are few opportunities to meet with their peers in the jurisdiction or from other jurisdictions. There is a need to learn about the opportunities and challenges and how others handle them.

In light of this, we at Government Technology have decided to create two summits (East and West) to allow managers who work in these complex environments to meet one another and exchange ideas and strategies. This will be a unique opportunity to network with people who manage large data processing environments on a daily basis. We hope this will be of interest and provide value to a wide variety of organizations and individuals.

Those interested in being part of this group are encouraged to contact me, Alan Cox, and I will keep you informed of our plans.

Alan Cox is executive director of Government Technology Executive Events.