The Pythian Group, a global team of database administrators (DBAs) to which companies turn for the outsourced administration of their enterprise databases, issued its forecast of the most critical issues facing its customers.
Open Source Software
Open source alternatives are being universally adopted in the startup and online communities and are also making inroads into more traditional applications, presenting novel opportunities for end users and evident challenges for the incumbent vendors.
Virtualization and Server Consolidation
Whether introduced to take advantage of economies of scale thanks to more robust hardware and software or to save energy and so green the data center, virtualization presents a massive, usually one-time, challenge for DBAs who must port their applications to the new configuration, and also undermines traditional licensing models based on a per-CPU pricing structure.
Federated Architecture
The flip side of virtualization is a federated architecture, whereby companies take advantage of the ever-falling cost of hardware and software to run their applications across large numbers of servers, architecting the applications so a robust decision-making layer directs every task to the most convenient or available resource.
Accelerating Compliance Obligations
Corporate IT compliance audits are becoming more demanding about certifying standards of care, with DBAs having to take on the burden of satisfying IT governance bodies that all is well.
Design for High Availability Is Going Mainstream
With more and more users distributing their applications across multiple server rooms, multiple data centers or several different locations around the globe, the need for high availability is going mainstream but the technologies are either missing from every vendor’s current feature set or are very expensive to deploy.
For more information on the Pythian Group, visit www.pythian.com.
This piece is brought to you by the Information Management editorial staff.
