InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
| August 18, 1997 | ||||||||||
Scalability: The Most Important Metric
By
Charles Pelton
A merger in the offing? Your organization must grow and
adapt. A popular new product line? The hardware and software
better be able to grow with that market. Look at the big
picture. With five years of unabated growth in the U.S., a
15-year bull stock market, and a healthy pickup in the
formerly sluggish economies in much of the rest of the
developed world, the operative IT function better be
scalability. After all, this expansion can't last forever.
Indeed, scalability has long been the advertising domain of
large and m
idrange system vendors. Even today, if you buy a
smaller AS/400, you can be assured that it'll be (fairly)
painless to swap it for a more powerful machine. Ditto when
it comes to many Unix machines -- and of course MVS or S/390
architectures. If a portion of the premise of IT "upgrading"
is embracing new technologies, surely the other reason always
rests on the need to enhance, grow, and multiply business
opportunities.
What about newer technologies? Why is there still so much
resistance among IT executives to embracing Microsoft Windows
NT? You always hear the objection about the lack of maturity
in the operating environment. But at the end of the day, it
always seems to come down to scalability.
At an
InformationWeek
-sponsored roundtable
in New York last
month a
group of enterprise server and mainframe vendors gathered
with a half dozen CIOs and a like number of IW editors to
discuss the future of the mainframe. The discussion was
seeded by a study of 250 read
ers which asked, among other
things, which was their operating environment of choice for
enterprise, mission-critical systems. Some 63% said MVS, 16%
said Unix, and only 6.4% said Windows NT. When asked to
project ahead two years, the numbers shifted slightly in NT's
favor -- 57% for MVS, 20% for Unix, and a doubling of the NT
numbers to 12.8%.
What's holding back universal acceptance of NT? Or, better
yet, is there anything more scalable than MVS? When asked if
MVS is sufficiently scalable, 63% said yes. For NT, the
number plummeted to 30%. But there's a twist. When asked to
project out two years, nearly 54% said that NT will be
sufficiently scalable.
NT -- or any operating environment for that matter -- will be
embraced when it's viewed as a vehicle to succeed, not an
impediment to growth. And success in the IT world may mean
the ability to scale up to embrace new opportunities or even
downsize to change market focus.
All this leads me to consider two more IT phenomena: the
Internet and the mi
croprocessor. One has enjoyed relatively
recent acceptance and popularity; the other has been viewed,
essentially, as an ever-more-powerful IT utility.
Is there anything more scalable than the Internet? Futurist
George Gilder talks about the coming apocalypse of
infrastructure and bandwidth. But no one is acting like
there's any constraint on networking resources. The fallacy
of the commons aside (and it will catch up with us all!), IT
organizations are behaving as if the Internet offers
unlimited communications and commerce opportunities. No
wonder so many companies are flocking to Java, intranets, and
browsers.
But if Microsoft, and by extension many other companies, push
and embrace NT as a corporate standard, is the standard Intel
microprocessor up to the task? During an InformationWeek
visit in early August to Intel facilities in and around
Portland, John Miner, VP and General Manager of Intel's
Enterprise Server Group, hinted at an evolving enterprise
orientation in the way his company develops
microprocessors
and related products. It's almost as if Intel is turning its
own world upside down, looking at corporate needs first, then
considering what powers faster and bigger PCs.
Says Miner, "Scalability in the future will be defined as
just adding another server." And he adds that he'd "never
like to be gated by an OS." Intel has ongoing initiatives and
research partnerships anywhere there is an impediment to
scalability -- the I/O, transaction processing technology,
software, and clustering.
Admittedly, there are limits to growth on the PC platform.
That's where NT's future scalability comes in. And that's why
clustering -- really a scalability strategy -- is so
important to the future of so many companies.
It has to be important. No company can afford to stand still.
Few remain in protected industries. Business growth and IT
scalability are inexorably entwined. A company with systems
that can't scale will be forced to stop, evaluate its
environment, and regroup. A company with systems th
at can
scale will be armed for all eventualities.
|
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ou can buy all the IT infrastructure you want, but if the
systems and processes that infrastructure supports can't
contract and expand, then your company can't respond to
market conditions.
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