During the last couple of weeks, I participated in several technical presales oriented workshops and seminars on different products from several vendors. Most recent events were on
LSI SVM (SAN virtualization),
Oracle Exadata (high performance database appliance),
IBM SVC (SAN virtualization),
IBM XIV (high performance FC/iSCSI storage), and
Sun 7000 Unified Storage series. They all share a very similar approach: be an easy to manage, easy to deploy, easy to use and easy to administer appliance. I'm in the storage/SAN field, but this appliance approach can be observed in other fields as well: network and SAN switches, firewalls, NAS filers, etc.
My personal wording for such appliances is
tie compatibility: one of the key selling points for all those systems is through higher management instead of technical staff and/or head of IT department. Sales droids usually argue with less
TCO and easy
GUI management. I name this
checkmark administration. While this is feasible from a management perspective, I wonder, what happens to all those highly skilled admins with all the experience and knowledge in their particular field. By running mostly self-managed appliances, which tasks will be left for those people? And no more need to pay high salaries for just klicking some buttons here and there ... Oh, wait a minute: Why even hire an admin? Maybe/probably it'll work, if the manager's secretary will get a two day training on the appliance. Fine, no more admin needed at all ...
There is another trend I observe: There are less and less good skilled people out there. Is it, because there are more and more appliances and skill/experience plain simple gets lost? Or is the reason for those appliances, that well trained and skilled people are difficult to find and expensive? I suspect the first, which makes me a bit sad. In the past, admins had to know their systems by heart. They could locate a broken disk by listening carefully to the sound of the storage array and could precisely predict the load of a server by estimating the speed of the fans. Today, a management GUI will tell, which component is broken, the component will have an indicator LED nearby and in many cases, there will a case already have been opened automagically at the vendor's support line by the system itself. Not uncommon, that one of those
checkmark administrators recognizes a broken disk only, because the vendor's service engineer is knocking on the door and has a replacement disk with him.
So, when will we get completely automated IT? And what will happen to system administrators at that point? And to all those
VARs (value added resellers) as well as independent service providers who make their living today with post sales consulting, maintenance and service, fixing broken systems, etc.? I work for one of those VARs and I'm far away of being amused about this future. Might happen way faster than we expect ...
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