Mastering Change in the Evolving Data Center - Industry Leader Q&A with Martin Timmerman, President of SHARE
As SHARE prepares for its upcoming conference in San Jose this summer, 5 Minute Briefing sat down with SHARE President Martin Timmerman to discuss new directions the organization has been taking within the past two years since he took office.
5 Minute Briefing: How has the data center world changed from 2006, when you started your tenure as SHARE president?
Timmerman: Virtualization has become an important area. Another is green IT, which has exploded on the scene. Both data center virtualization and power consumption play very heavily into that. It all comes down to computing as becoming more and more ubiquitous. Every part of business makes use of computerization, and its use is expanding. Storage needs are exploding, generating a lot of heat and power requirements in the data center.
Another change is that the enterprise data center is not just an IBM mainframe. The enterprise data center has hardware and software technologies from multiple suppliers. There's an increasing role for SHARE to put out that enterprise story, how all those things integrate together, and bring a number of hardware and software vendors together.
5 Minute Briefing: There's been more of a focus on data centers in recent years. The data center executive or manager is a rising star for many organizations.
Timmerman: Yes, because as many distributed units found out, it's not just a simple algorithm to buy a server and an operating system and an application and put it together to get all your needs satisfied. You do have to talk to others, you have to get data from others, and you have to integrate. If you do those one at a time, it's a lot of hard work.
5 Minute Briefing: What's the greatest career challenge for SHARE members in the years ahead?
Timmerman: With everything that's happening in the IT space, you can't just sit in the back hall anymore, and connect a blue box to a storage unit. You do have to talk to the business units and understand their needs. The business units are becoming much more technology-savvy, and they better understand what some of the options are, both in the application side and some infrastructure side of things. You have to be able to provide the best and well-integrated solution, so you can provide solutions for all parts of the organization - from accounts receivable to Web delivery to marketing. You need to understand how all the pieces fit together, and how to provide the best technologies from vendors.
5 Minute Briefing: What is SHARE's role as an organization in this changing environment?
Timmerman: Along those same lines, helping members to understand and integrate all these different hardware and software technologies. What SHARE brings to the table is an opportunity to help data centers with IBM technologies to integrate with other components. There are a lot of vendors in the marketplace, and SHARE is the one place where companies can find how to put these solutions together.
5 Minute Briefing: What advice would you give to data center and mainframe professionals, or those considering opportunities in the field?
Timmerman: Certainly there are lots of opportunities. A lot of corporate environments include mainframes within their IT infrastructure, and offer very lucrative, very stable computing careers that continue to change. The mainframe has a legacy because it has been around a long time providing value. It continues to change its capabilities, and it is able to deliver modern workloads for modern applications. And not just on the back end. There are a number of Web-based consumer environments where the back end is a mainframe. It's a very solid platform that's going to be around for a while - you can make an interesting career out of it.
5 Minute Briefing: What can IT professionals expect to see at SHARE at the San Jose gathering this summer?
Timmerman: We have been focusing our sessions around important emerging issues, such as SOA and business continuity. In San Jose, we're going to have a bigger splash around virtualization. We know data centers are looking to virtualization at the server level, the storage level, and the network level. This is something that enterprise data centers are very much involved in, and practitioners need information on current tools, and how to integrate those from multiple vendors.
5 Minute Briefing: Any new themes emerging?
Timmerman: Yes, cloud computing. Earlier this year, we met with various IBM executives, and learned about cloud computing initiatives within IBM research. An executive from IBM Research is going to be out in San Jose to give a session on cloud computing, and meet with others at the conference to find ways we can explore this together. We have some of the largest corporations in America in the SHARE membership who may be looking for ways to implement cloud computing.
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