From Pet Systems to Cattle Farm — What Happened to the Data Center?

2022-02-24 05:27

We examine the implications for data center workloads, and for the people that run them - who have now lost their pet systems.

The 1990's data center was very much composed of pet systems.

Firewalls, threat detection, and regular patching against vulnerabilities are the sort of security tools that IT admins had to adopt to protect their pet systems through the turn of the millennium.

Tech teams could no longer afford to spend the time to adjust each one as precisely as before, but the large numbers used and efficiency gained thanks to virtualization meant that the overall computing power in the room would still surpass the results of pet systems.

While a few core services, like identity management servers or other systems storing critical information would still remain as pets, the majority were now regarded as cattle - sure, you didn't want any of them to fail, but if one did, it could quickly get replaced with another, equally unremarkable, system performing a specific task.

While security could be "Crafted" into pet systems, cattle environments require a slightly different approach - and certainly still requires a strong focus on security.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/02/from-pet-systems-to-cattle-farm-what.html