80 Percent of Businesses Will Find Growth Constrained From a Lack of New Data Centre Skills by 2016: Gartner

BANGALORE: Gartner, Inc. said that capacity planning and performance management skills within IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are no longer sufficient to meet business needs in the digital economy era.

By 2016, the availability of capacity and performance management skills for horizontally scaled architectures will be a major constraint or risk to growth for 80 percent of major businesses.

"While major organizations continue to maintain and sustain their conventional capacity-planning skills and tools, they need to regularly re-evaluate the tools available and develop the capacity and performance management skills present in the Web-scale IT community," said Ian Head, research director at Gartner. "Web-scale IT organizations do things differently — they learn from one another. Conventional IT organizations can use some of the Web-scale techniques heading for mainstream adoption in the next three years."

To help I&O professionals focus their efforts, Gartner recommends the following action:

Embrace stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures to improve capacity and performance management

Web-scale organizations extend the virtualization concept by architecting applications to be stateless wherever possible (i.e., not recording and relying on user session data to function) and to work within a horizontally scaling infrastructure that facilitates rapid and near-real-time reallocation of resources. Furthermore, workloads associated with these applications must be standardized and categorized (e.g., latency-sensitive and compliance-driven workloads) to enable the infrastructure team to assign infrastructure resources appropriately. These vital characteristics of Web-scale IT form the foundation for capacity and performance management.

Also Read:
Alibaba's Jack Ma Richest Man In China: Report