The IT infrastructure of 2025, the result of software-led infrastructure, DevOps and other trends impacting IT today, will be a generation beyond today’s IT, writes consultant and Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe in “Software-Led Infrasturcture Will Elevate The Need for DevOps and Open CIO Opportunities“.  It will be more application aware, disaster-resistant and business-friendly, in general more mature.

The new management opportunities provided by server virtualization give a strong clue to what software-led infrastructure in general will provide. These, Lowe writes, include:

• The ability to adjust VM resources with a few mouse clicks,
• The ability to add resources to VMs on the fly without disrupting ongoing operations,
• The ability to configure VMs to act proactively in the event of common IT disasters such as power outages, making them much more disaster resistant.

As storage and networking catch up, the entire infrastructure will become much more resiliant and responsive to changing workload demands. The infrastructure of 2025 will be able to respond automatically to application needs in near real-time, for instance deploying VMs, allocating adequate network bandwidth and creating an appropriate storage environment for an application. 

DevOps

The DevOps movement, he writes, is bringing a programmatic mentality to IT operations. The collaborative approach to application development and support increases application awareness in the IT staff and operational needs into software development. That can encourage developers to take advantage of underlying technology such as virtualization to add the features of the future as they become practical.

In the mean time, he writes, CIOs should introduce workload automation technologies into the infrastructure. They should encourage increased collaboration between IT silos and the groups involved in the various stages of the application lifestyle to create more of an inclusive awareness of the infrastructure as a whole. The staff will need this larger consciousness as the presence of software-led infrastructure grows and inevitably breaks down those silos.