Speech Summaries

Frank E. Gillett Vice President Forrester Research, Inc.

Building An Organic Infrastructure

Frank Gillett, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, talked about how to build an Organic IT infrastructure without needing new, expensive equipment. According to Frank, you don't need a forklift to bring in the equipment needed to build an Organic IT infrastructure.

He started by talking about how much "gear" and equipment is present in today's current infrastructure. When you need a new rack for more servers and storage today, you need a forklift to bring in your equipment. Because of the additional equipment, more employees are needed to maintain this technology. Frank then showed how hardware, network, and storage can be shared in an Organic IT infrastructure so that there is a higher utilization of current gear. This also cuts down on the amount of manpower needed.

Frank explained that, to implement server pooling, servers need to be standardized and then tied together with rapid provisioning software. Frank showed a Forrester Wave™ for ranking the vendors that can provide this software. He then talked about storage provisioning, which is networking storage together using storage virtualization hardware and software. Frank continued then by talking about how to implement network pooling, using what Forrester calls a redundant array of Internet links (RAIL), and he showed which vendors can provide this by displaying another Forrester Wave™.

Frank concluded by introducing three strategies for implementing Organic IT, which are based on your vendor and technology adoption preferences: cautious, selective, and aggressive. He outlined how to proceed with Organic IT adoption using these three strategies, and he described the benefits and downfalls of each.

Questions And Answers

Q: If part of Organic IT is about retrofitting the datacenter and my company outsources, how do I get my provider to move to Organic IT?
A: Try to renegotiate the contracts and demand that you start saving money as a result of the possibilities of Organic IT. You know the savings are there, so put the pressure on the providers.

Q: Which standards will drive Organic IT?
A: First of all, some basic Organic IT savings can be realized without the development of new technology standards. A fair amount of Organic IT can be accomplished without standards right now. Standards will help in the future when some of these technologies like storage virtualization become better and more standardized. But you don't have to wait for standards to get the benefits of Organic IT today.