Infrastructure Management Companion
	Practice Leader:	Jonathan Eunice	bio	email	keynote

The Infrastructure Management Companion is Illuminata's program of assistance for those working to bring their sprawling  datacenters under systematic command and control. 

Whether your datacenter focuses on enterprise, service provider, or HPC applications, we offer a technically sophisticated, business-savvy perspective on the products, technologies, techniques, and vendors that are working to dramatically simplify datacenter management. Topics include:

• Industry-wide drive to more dynamic, optimized, utility-style IT offerings such as IBM's On Demand, HP's Adaptive Infrastructure, and Sun's N1;
• Mechanisms, both technical and business, for making dynamic datacenters practical;
• Virtualization technologies across server, storage, and network components;
• Automated provisioning of application infrastructure and resources;
• Multi-system workload management and resource cooperation;
• Aggregated management (especially necessary for dense datacenters, and critical to blade and modular computing);
• Policy-driven and process-driven tools and approaches to management tasks;
• Service level management, the cornerstone of turning IT into a business service;
• Grid and clustered computing (especially as it transcends its HPC foundations to become a generalized resource management standard);
• Requirements for improved datacenter fabrics and network-resident intelligence;
• Autonomic computing and other intelligent, automated, or transparent techniques that enable preventative, proactive, and human-free management;
• Emerging application APIs/models for dynamic environments;
• The role of standards such as SNMP, DMI, CIM, WBEM, .NET, and OGSA;
• Missing links and components such as application topology toolsets and system deployment models, and their eventual emergence;
• The relationship of flexible infrastructure to service providers (a.k.a. ASPs), systems integrators, and other parts of the IT value chain;
• Software licensing and provisioning models needed to suit a dynamic datacenter;
• Cultural changes and operational advancements needed for IT functions to be provided, removed, updated, upgraded, and re-purposed in near-real-time; and
• Product choices and investment strategies needed to take advantage of industry trends and the best technology.

Illuminata clients may recognize the roots of Infrastructure Management in our prior Enterprise Management practice. As the industry and user concerns have matured, the key manageability issues have shifted from comprehensive distributed management to much more focused models of datacenter management. Our practice has similarly evolved. While the practice name is new for 2003, this is Illuminata's tenth year assisting clients with manageability issues.

Take control of your Infrastructure today!  Contact sales@illuminata.com.