I know this question has been asked many times before but in the

enterprise space it seems that ITIL is always a given. My thoughts are

maybe changes in the IT industry might change the need for ITIL. To be

clear on this I am not proposing to know the answer to this question.

Some Industry Considerations

Five years ago when I would teach a class to enterprise customers I

would always ask all the customers how many servers do you manage? On a

good day I would get maybe 10k and only a couple of super

infrastructure banks would answer above 20k. Recently I have been

attending a number of open source meetings and I am meeting people who

tell me that their infrastructures have over 100k servers and I finding

more and more that these numbers are actually small in the new WEB 2.0

world. I have talked to some consultants who are working with RackSpace

and they have told me they have over 100k servers. A recent article by

Robin Harris suggests that Google might have over a million cores. I

can’t image how many servers Amazon is farming with their S3/EC2

offerings.

Changing the Game

Companies like Facebook are adding 350k user’s a day and doubling

ever six months. Virtual World networks like Second Life and Kaneva are

growing with numbers that are mind blowing. How do companies cope with

change in these types of environments? My belief is that they have two

options. One, they go and blow and don’t focus on traditional ITM/ESM

techniques or two they change the game. If you look at what Google is

doing in Portland on the Columbia River, they are indeed changing the

game. They are using free software and cheap hardware to build what

they call “Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer”. I

recently attended an IBM session where their development lab in Markham

Ontario is completely virtual and is run by a giant provisioning system

called Tornado. IBM developers in this facility select their

provisioned system from a self service portal and its all on demand.

Perhaps the best example of a company changing the game is Amazon’s.

Amazon processes over 4 million purchase transactions per day utilizing

over 150 different network services to deliver these successful

transactions. They are building their infrastructure based on the

Google Three Rules.

1. Cheap Servers - Mass produced low end servers, free software. Energy efficient switches and unmanaged switches.

2. Expect Failure - Cheap hardware will fail. Therefore build recovery into the software.

3. Scalability - Create monster scalability. Google has created clusters that exceed 8000.

Enterprises like Google and Amazon are defining a new type of data

center. I compare it to RAID 1 for servers. Plan for failures the way

large companies plan for redundant electricity. This kind of future

could normalize IT to the status of electricity that is a true

commodity. If you take a closer look at Amazon’s Elastic Computing

Cloud (EC2), today you are guaranteed 99.999% availability for your

servers and your total investment is a light switch and service bill

with no ITIL required.

John Willis

johnmwillis.com