Benefits and challenges of managing heterogeneous data centers

Today's businesses have a wealth of options available to them for running their applications. They can use proprietary infrastructures, private data centers, co-location facilities, or public clouds. Applications can be deployed on native hardware or virtualization can be used to improve consolidation and manageability. Public cloud platforms are growing in popularity, but businesses must decide both what types of services to use within a cloud and which cloud platform to use in the first place. While making use of these diverse resources poses management challenges, it also opens new opportunities for optimizing performance and ensuring reliability by carefully matching applications to the resources that will best support them. In this paper we present the benefits and drawbacks of data center diversity, and discuss our experience enhancing IBM's Tivoli Endpoint Manager system to better support mixed proprietary infrastructure, public, and private cloud environments.