The Data Center: Forecast of Clouds Could Leave IT Staffing High and Dry

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The Data Center: Forecast of Clouds Could Leave IT Staffing High and Dry
By John Rath

June 15, 2008 —

Cloud computing is a new economic model for how computing can be delivered. This model change happens at the data center as well. While cloud computing subscribers abandon their own infrastructure, the cloud providers are ramping up theirs and building massively scaled data centers.

I’m not sure if we’re quite to the point of everyone embracing a lights-out data center yet, but we are certainly closing in. For IT workers, this cloudy weather can be seen as a shift from working in an IT department at a company to working at a large data center for a cloud computing provider, where the infrastructure they are dealing with is much larger, there is much more automation, and the complexity of integration grows ten-fold.

Shifts in technology have always affected IT workers, although this change could have a much greater impact. Instead of just having to keep up with different hardware and software skills that are ever-changing, the shift to cloud computing has the potential to all but eliminate the small- and medium-sized business IT staff, where infrastructure is migrated to the cloud. The employee desktop is migrated to a virtualized instance in the cloud; all applications, databases and virtual machines or servers can be moved to the cloud, and support for all of this can also be supplied by the cloud provider.

Clouds aside, there are some interesting trends to observe in technology staffing. The mega data centers being built by Microsoft and Google are interesting case studies in staffing ratios and what it takes to support a facility of that size. Both companies have highlighted the factor of available workforce in their site selection studies and both stress the importance of being near universities with good information-technology programs.

Microsoft, Yahoo and others have been cited as having around 50 employees per data center, while many have questioned the reported 200 employees to staff a Google data center. Without getting deep into that discussion, I think it is simply a difference in the fact that Google needs more employees to maintain the large quantities of low-cost commodity servers, where Microsoft probably pays more up front for an enterprise-grade server and thus needs less staff to maintain them. Both companies realize the investment in employee recruitment and continuing education needed to properly train staff in the technology used inside the facility.

On datacenter.tv, Don Denning from Lee Technologies talks about the number of data center staff dwindling as more processes become automated and the on-site roles move toward facilities staff. The jobs needed inside the data center are primarily to maintain the mission-critical environment for IT equipment, as well as the technicians to physically place and replace servers and network gear. Everything else can be done remotely.

The required skill sets split into maintaining the data center environment and operating the equipment in the data center. As the data center landscape changes, it is becoming more complex and architect and network designer jobs will proliferate. Unfortunately, these jobs typically are filled by senior-level technical and management professionals, a talent pool that will shrink by 45 percent by 2015, according to AFCOM.

An October 2007 study by Symantec showed that data centers are understaffed. The primary reason was not the economy or a lack of applicants, but a lack of qualified applicants. The increasing complexity of the data center environment and integration with facilities is making it hard for employers to find the right kind of person to entrust with their critical infrastructure. A quick search on SimplyHired.com for the term “data center,” resulted in 64 percent of the job postings requiring more than five years of experience. The shortage of skills and experience will force companies to train the younger workforce quickly and keep programs in place to keep them current with a rapidly changing, complex environment.

I recently spoke to a group of graduating high school students that were interested in IT careers. As someone who has read a fair number of resumes, I stressed to them not to list MS-DOS, Microsoft Word or similar items on their resumes. In an age where we are surrounded by technology, it is not enough to simply use it; the IT employee must understand it and embrace the right attitude toward diving in headfirst to the IT and business challenges that a company faces. Much of the IT architect and design jobs that less experienced employees can grow into require an understanding of the business and business requirements, and then translating them into IT solutions.

The data center industry seemingly runs on a different cycle than what the other economic sectors experience, but a different type of talent crunch will require a new strategy to solve the problem.

John Rath is an independent consultant and blogger at Datacenterlinks.com. He can be reached at johnsr4@gmail.com.

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, data centers, green computing

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