10 data center paradoxes -- widening area networks; iPhone inspiration (2)

Last week, I published the first five megatrends reshaping today's data centers, pulled from my latest article in Database Trends & Applications.

Here the remaining five of the top 10 shifts, or paradoxes that are turning data centers upside down, rightside up, and many other directions:

Paradox 6: Consumerist Technology Trumps Corporate Computing: Will we someday see iPhone-based data centers? Data center planners are increasingly taking pages from the playbooks of consumer devices and services, which seem to be outpacing corporate IT in innovation.

Paradox 7: Networks Become Too Wide for Wide Area Networks: The rise of remote workforces and cloud computing is far outpacing the abilities of wide area networks (WANs) to keep up.

Paradox 8: IT Finally Starts to Automate Its Own House: IT departments have done a stellar job of automating tasks and processes all across the organization - from call centers to loading docks to benefits management. But the greatest challenge now lies ahead: automating IT management itself -- from provisioning; patching process and recovery from routine failures; and setting up, allocating, balancing and correcting the performance of servers and storage.

Paradox 9: Business Intelligence Shared with Other Businesses: BI used to be a secretive process to gather senistive information about operations, custimers, and markets. Now the trend is to open up all this data, via collaborative sites, to partners, customers, and who knows who else. Think about the impact on supply chain management when vendors know in advance what demand is coming downstream, and what's driving it.

Paradox 10: The Rise of Empowered Users Means the End of Empowered PCs: All sorts of vital services are now coming from the cloud, accessed through a browser.