Management, compliance, and security concerns have made consolidation all the rage in large organizations, which have increasingly
moved their applications and data from globally dispersed servers to a few centralized, tightly secured data centers. With
the trend toward intelligent networks, we may one day see remote offices with very little intelligence of their own.
“We’re finding that organizations want to pull more and more of their persistent data back into the data center,” says Joe
Skorupa, research director at Gartner. “Whether the reason is Sarbanes-Oxley or the need to reduce operating overhead, they
want as little as possible in the branch office.”
As networks become better at managing application delivery and performance over the WAN, the prospect of moving just about
everything into the data center becomes much more practical.
“You’ll no longer run any SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange in the branch,” Skorupa says. “Instead, the branch office server
may wind up running only DNS, DHCP, print services, and a domain controller. With the leftover processing, perhaps it can
do some non-file-based caching or it can push for content delivery.”
This will also become more practical as Microsoft starts allowing customers to build Windows servers with only the components
they need. This will allow you to strip out some of the functionality that you don’t need or components that may pose a security
issue or administrative problem, Skorupa says.
Take this a little further, however, and maybe you don’t need that Windows or Linux server at all. WOCs (WAN Optimization
Controllers) are mostly built using off-the-shelf, PC-based platforms, because vendors lack the money for dedicated, optimized
hardware platforms. At the central site, the WOC might be integrated into the application-delivery controller. At the branch
office end it could be built right into the branch office router as a blade, and could conceivably take over DNS, DHCP, and
print services, as well as caching, and TCP optimization. The result is a dumbed-down, serverless branch office and a battle
between former allies.
“You may see Cisco, Juniper, and HP competing with Microsoft, IBM, and Sun for control of the branch office,” Skorupa speculates.
“Cisco could say, ‘Get rid of your branch office servers, plug this blade in your router, and we’ll make the whole thing easier
to integrate and manage.’” Sounds a little like the mainframe days, doesn’t it?
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