It was quite interesting to discuss the topic "what's a datacenter" with several people. Although the folks who manage facilities, systems and software use the the same word, they're really not thinking of the same thing at all. This, of course, leads to confusion, misunderstandings and, on occasion, failures. I can here it now, readers saying "Daniel, what are you talking about?"
Let's look at how each group might define the term.
| Group | Group's View of Datacenter Components |
| Facilities Management | A building (or group of buildings), power supplies, air conditioning/chillers, fire suppression equipment and communications lines |
| Systems Management | computers (mainframe, midrange, industry standard), storage systems, networking equipment and, quite possibly, various types of appliance servers that support specific functions |
| Solutions Architects | some sort of system supporting one or more operating environments, data management functions, storage management funcitons, network management functions, application deployment frameworks and, of course, the applications themselves. |
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It is quite clear how three different members of an organization's staff could all think that they're speaking about the same thing and yet not be aligned at all.
Can you think of other areas of computing that pose similar challenges?
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