The last days of the data center, IT practitioners go from here?

A few days ago Jason Perlow published an article saying that the data center industry is about to usher in a zombie-like movie the end, most of the data center will be abandoned, and go to IaaS service. Few organizations have survived such an end, and the same jobs left for IT practitioners will also be gradually reduced, resulting in more ordinary technicians becoming "useless people."

The following is the translation:

The Walking Dead by AMC has become one of the hottest TV series in cable and HBO's fantasy series Game of Thrones also contains elements of zombies. The Zombieland also received a good box office after the release. World War Z The film, adapted from the same novel by Max Brooks, once again set the highest box office in the United States for weekend movies.

Much like a vampire, the theme of the Thousands of Years to Rejuvenate attracts a large number of fans, especially in the wake of the 2002 British horror / science-fiction movie. Days After the traditional slow zombie was replaced by a fast-moving zombie, the field has rekindled. They do not have to be subdivided into these zombies in that they share some common characteristics: because a number of specific incidents cause a large proportion of people to die, become sick or crazy, then become sluggish, long for devouring humans, destructively destroying desire, and weakening Modern Civilization. Only a small percentage of people have survived and have the ability to adapt quickly to the environment; they need to keep evading those zombies to avoid being infected as part of those zombies.

Reflecting on this situation and reflecting it into real life, we suddenly realize that we may actually experience this event - not that humans become zombies but IT industries as we know it. Just as in zombie movies, there are only a few survivors!

During the five years I worked for IBM, starting in the summer of 2007, I worked on hardening and migrating data centers and performing different types of IT transformation and migration tasks. Fortune 500 has entered into a contract with IBM GTS (Global Technology Services) to reduce the number of servers using virtualization technologies such as VMware and various Unix-based and mainframe management programs by using IBM's data center SO ( Strategic Outsourcing) Sectors effectively reduce the number of servers.

These are large, long-term projects that make IBM profitable in the form of hardware, software and services. For a long time, we all ran multiple such projects simultaneously. As I left IBM, the benefits were already drying up and we started looking for other revenue models for these technologies, such as private cloud implementations. And six months ago, I learned from my colleagues that before the business has indeed become very small.

While there is still a certain amount of long-term business in operation, as major customers have shrunk their investments in IT, large projects like the ones I attended no longer exist. Instead of building a data center, big investments have been put on the cloud.

In the cloud, they benefit from the "self-service" and "how much to pay" model, prefer to spend money to do something big, and out of the box model also allows them to save more manpower and resources. Of course, layoffs have taken place here, as well as reducing the previously used outsourcing strategy like IBM.

And my opinion was also validated this week, with Armonk announcing the massive "Resource Action" that will undoubtedly infiltrate IBM's existing business. Although we can not get specific data, we know from some friends that more than 20% or more of Global Services jobs will disappear in about two years. Overseas work will be reduced to the limit, but the same domestic jobs will also be hit. Unless you have the skills you need in big data and cloud computing, you risk becoming unemployed. If the largest information and professional services companies in our industry are strictly controlling jobs, we can not really think of what weaker companies will do. There are other average staff, system administrators and other people who work in the data center. The specific executor should go from here. Like World War Z, the situation is obviously less optimistic.

As described, as the cloud movement continues, the entire data industry will become extremely gloomy. Only large-scale service providers such as Amazon, Azure, Google, Rackspace, Saviis and tier-one telecom service providers like AT & T and Verizon can survive to support high-volume data center infrastructures and provide services to large corporations Service Level Agreement (SLA) for resiliency, failover, and response time.

Judging by the recent acquisition of Softlayer by IBM and the launch of a new cloud services division, perhaps the blue giants saw a downturn in the data center business and a transition. It is also a search for a highly automated configuration that brings with it the same result of cutting jobs in the data center.

I can not say I have a crystal ball that predicts the future, but the prospect of a massive disappearance of the hosting infrastructure is clear, with the same reduction in information technology jobs. Like the protagonist of a zombie movie, only some highly skilled humans survive.