Web-scale IT to be an architectural approach by 50 percent enterprises

BANGALORE, INDIA: By 2017, Web-scale IT will be an architectural approach found operating in 50pc of global enterprises, up from less than 10pc in 2013, according to Gartner.

"Large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are reviving the way in which IT services can be delivered," said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner.

"Their capabilities go beyond scale in terms of sheer size to also include scale as it pertains to speed and agility. If enterprises want to keep pace, then they need to emulate the architectures, processes and practices of these exemplary cloud providers."

"Web-scale IT looks to change the IT value chain in a systemic fashion," said Haight. "Data centers are designed with an industrial engineering perspective that looks for every opportunity to reduce cost and waste. This goes beyond redesigning facilities to be more energy efficient to also include in-house design of key hardware components such as servers, storage and networks.

Web-oriented architectures allow developers to build very flexible and resilient systems that recover from failure more quickly."

"These devices were different than those sold to traditional enterprises, because they did not have some of the basic features often available in commercial products." Regardless of the cloud services company, a common element among all these devices was an organizational requirement to run an open-source OS, not only to reduce costs, but also to increase the control of IT environments.

This brings several consequences for the contemporary enterprise. First, and perhaps most importantly, an open approach provides more options for hardware (and data center) equipment design and procurement; where scale-out architectures make sense. While Gartner expects that traditional suppliers will provide solutions aligned with these blueprints, new providers will also have offerings.

With the server hegemony broken, enterprises will have a chance to leverage the economies of scale designed into these systems; not just from a pricing perspective, but also from an operations expense position. Although this cost is difficult to measure, a new sense of innovation is beginning to steep the industry that likely will have additional benefits further down the line for large cloud services firms, as well as traditional enterprises.

At the same time, loosely coupled, Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-based software architectures are enabling development teams to increasingly operate independently, while improving overall application resiliency. IT organizations must rethink how applications are designed if they are to meet the requirements of Web-scale IT environments.

These requirements include; scaling performance proportionally with the addition of resources, adapting to the needed degree of business change, remaining resilient in the face of infrastructure fragility and being operationally efficient as the size of the system grows.

Converging, a new application and architectural approach puts enterprises on the path of design for operations. This means that having examined how to tweaking performance and resiliency from the start, IT organizations can begin to rethink their operational support. As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 25pc of global enterprise CIOs will have had previous involvement in corporate Web-scale IT initiatives, up from less than 5 percent in 2013.