I’ve been heads down this past week working on some research on the future of data centers. Here are a few thoughts after a week of pondering.

Part of the problem in data centers is the lack of awareness by the various parties in developing data centers. I stopped being surprised when facility operations team had no idea what hardware and software is running in data centers. Part of the problem is people don’t take the time to communicate how things are changing.

Imagine you are a Disney attraction park.

And the facility operations team mindset was “as long as the park was running, their job is done.” Silo'd thinking is pervasive in data centers in IT as the overall system is so complex, and quite frankly the other parts are many times boring. Do facility ops team get excited about the new cloud environment or a ruby on rails deployment?

I think the responsibility for fixing this problem resides in management as it is difficult if not impossible for individual contributors to change the mindset. FYI, when I reviewed this post, it reminded me that Mike Manos worked for Disney Interactive, and maybe he picked up some ideas on how the team needs to work together for the common goal.