In a recent conversation with Hewlett-Packard Co.’s chief technology officer, Victor Garcia, I first heard the concept of “trusted cloud computing”. Coined by HP, the phrase characterizes what the company envisions as the next generation data centre where server performance will be variable and utilized on-demand.
It’s a sophisticated type of data centre, Garcia said to me, “where applications and data run in a trusted environment accessible by a new type of network and running new types of applications that have all kinds of environmental benefits like decreased energy consumption, improved performance.”
Therefore, depending on daily needs, the data centre will be capable of adjusting its performance to, for instance, output 1,000 CPU cycles today and only 100 CPU cycles tomorrow, thereby allowing true dynamic access to computer resources.
But to be truly trusted, the data centre will require security mechanisms, and infrastructure and performance management, Garcia noted, all of which must be automated because people are notoriously unreliable and prone to making errors.
The idea that IT admin staff will gradually be edged out of the data centre may actually come as a relief to IT managers. Earlier this year, a survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates on behalf of Stratavia, found that one issue with running data centres was getting people to want to work in them. If HP’s vision of a trusted data centre holds true, then IT managers can check that task off their list of dreaded things to do.
But while HP’s next generation data centre will be managed in an automated fashion, that doesn't mean they'll be completely human-free. Some form of human supervision will be required at the highest level of the food chain probably to manage the systems that are, in turn, managing performance, infrastructure and security.
If you’ve seen the movie Eagle Eye (it’s still in theatres now but I’ll spoil the ending anyway) and believe that an intelligent supercomputer like ARIA can turn wayward and start taking matters into its own hands, then you might cringe at the idea of a data centre that’s supposedly trusted.
But that’s Hollywood. And while a data centre completely void of human presence is not yet in the cards, at least spending one’s days cramped in the cold confines of racks and wires tending to menial tasks may soon be a thing of the past for IT staff.