Double-Take Software

First let’s start with what Dynamic Infrastructure is as defined by Wikipedia: Dynamic Infrastructure is an information technology ^[1] model which provides the ability to intelligently, automatically and securely move workloads in a data center ^[2] anytime, anywhere. Whether the purpose is for migrations, provisioning ^[3], enhancing performance or building co-location facilities, workloads are moved with inherent security and data protection ^[4]. The feature benefits include enhancing performance, scalability ^[5] , ability to perform routine maintenance on either physical or virtual systems all while minimizing interruption to business operations and reducing cost for IT. Dynamic Infrastructure will help provide needed business continuity and high availability requirements to facilitate cloud or grid computing.

Many companies over the years have claimed that they provide Dynamic infrastructure but it has typically fallen short of the industries expectations. Primarily the short fall in expectations has been because the solutions have been proprietary and required specific hardware solutions in order to have the fully autonomic management and even then it wasn’t quite dynamic. The recent surge and interest in cloud/grid computing has spurred companies to look more toward software solutions to provide this capability without being tied to a single proprietary hardware and or virtualization solution. Ultimately, dynamic infrastructure is hardware agnostic as well as virtual independent which allow data center managers to not only use their existing hardware but also have their choice in which virtualization or operating system platform solution they wish to deploy and or have the option of deploying many variations to be fully dynamic.

A few companies are leading this dynamic initiative with recent acquisitions which now provide these features and functionality for faster provisioning, management in any environment. For some of us Trek Heads, is it that far of a stretch to conceive your data center could become like the Borg?

When one server or system goes down another will automatically is replaced servicing the same functions as its predecessor until the original came be fixed and replaced and or redeployed elsewhere where needed?

The future isn’t as far off as you think. The underlying technology is available today and it won’t be long before your data center can manage itself and all you have to do is check in every once in a while via your iPhone, BlackBerry or PDA.