Dynamic Infrastructure

Dynamic Infrastructure also known as Infrastructure 2.0 and Next Generation Data Center is an information technology model which provides the ability to intelligently, automatically and securely move workloads in a data center anytime, anywhere. Whether the purpose is for migrations, provisioning, enhancing performance or building co-location facilities, workloads are moved with inherent security and data protection The feature benefits include enhancing performance, scalability , ability to perform routine maintenance on either physical or virtual systems all while minimizing interruption to business operations and reducing cost for IT. Dynamic Infrastructure will help provide needed business continuity and high availability requirements to facilitate cloud or grid computing.
“A dynamic infrastructure integrates business and IT assets and aligns them with the overall goals of the business while taking a smarter, new and more streamlined approach to helping improve service, reduce cost, and manage risk.”

For networking companies, Infrastructure 2.0 refers to the ability of networks to keep up with the movement and scale requirements of new enterprise IT initiatives, especially virtualization and cloud computing. According to companies like Cisco, F5 Networks and Infoblox, network automation and connectivity intelligence between networks, applications and endpoints will be required to reap the full benefits of virtualization and many types of cloud computing. This will require network management and infrastructure to be consolidated, enabling higher levels of dynamic control and connectivity between networks, systems and endpoints.
Need for a holistic approach
Even in the face of global uncertainty, it is the infrastructure that continues to enable commerce and communications - the roads, networks, utilities, and technologies connecting and differentiating organizations, competitors and customers. The need therefore, is for a new type of infrastructure that:
* Enables visibility, control and automation across all business and IT assets
* Is highly optimized to achieve more with less
* Addresses the information challenge
* Leverages flexible sourcing like clouds
* Manages and mitigates risks
Organizations need an infrastructure that can propel them forward - not hold them back. Until now, many organizations have thought of physical infrastructure and IT infrastructure as separate. This meant, for example, that airports, roadways, buildings, power plants, and oil wells were managed in one way, while datacenters, PCs, cell phones, routers, and broadband devices were managed quite differently.
To succeed in today's world of instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent assets, a new approach is needed. Now, the infrastructure of atoms and the infrastructure of bits are merging into an intelligent, global, dynamic infrastructure. This convergence of business and IT assets requires an infrastructure that can measure and manage the lifecycle of assets that exist beyond the data center, throughout an organization's entire facilities as well as between one organization and another. The range of this approach is broader than ever before, and its effect on organizations is equally far-reaching.
Benefits of having a dynamic infrastructure
A dynamic infrastructure takes advantage of the intelligence gained across the network. By design, a dynamic infrastructure is service-oriented and focused on supporting and enabling the end users in a highly responsive way. It can utilize alternative sourcing approaches, like cloud computing to deliver new services with agility and speed.
Global organizations already have the foundation for a dynamic infrastructure that will bring together the business and IT infrastructure to create new possibilities. For example:
* Transportation companies can optimize their vehicles' routes leveraging GPS and traffic information.
* Facilities organizations can secure access to locations and track the movement of assets by leveraging RFID technology.
* Production environments can monitor and manage presses, valves and assembly equipment through embedded electronics.
* Technology systems can be optimized for energy efficiency, managing spikes in demand, and ensuring disaster recovery readiness.
* Communications companies can better monitor usage by location, user or function, and optimize routing to enhance user experience.
* Utility companies can reduce energy usage with a "smart grid."
Virtualized applications can reduce the cost of testing, packaging and supporting an application by 60%, and they reduced overall TCO by 5% to 7% in our model.
- Source: Gartner - "TCO of Traditional Software Distribution vs. Application Virtualization" / Michael A Silver, Terrence Cosgrove, Mark A Margevicious, Brian Gammage / 16 April 2008
While green issues are a primary driver in 10% of current data center outsourcing and hosting initiatives, cost reductions initiatives are a driver 47% of the time and are now aligned well with green goals. Combining the two means that at least 57% of data center outsourcing and hosting initiatives are driven by green.
- Source: Gartner - "Green IT Services as a Catalyst for Cost Optimization." / Kurt Potter / 4 December 2008
"By 2013, more than 50% of midsize organizations and more than 75% of large enterprises will implement layered recovery architectures."
- Source: Gartner - "Predicts 2009: Business Continuity Management Juggles Standardization, Cost and Outsourcing Risk"). / Roberta J Witty, John P Morency, Dave Russell, Donna Scott, Rober Desisto / 28 January 2009
The key to a business and IT infrastructure that is "dynamic" is leveraging technologies, service delivery and acquisition models that optimize the infrastructure for efficiency and flexibility while transforming management to an automated service delivery and management model.

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