What is the Infrastructure Chasm? The Infrastructure Chasm is an ideaology developed by some peers of mine. It discusses some of the problems in the IT industry and opens discussion about how to resolve it. To discuss what the Chasm is, let’s breakdown this diagram.

The black line represens % of a systems utilization, and the red line represents the potential processing power of systems.

ERA 1 represents the dawn of the computer age. This was a time when computers were extremely slow compared to what we have available today. However, they were utilized to their maximum. This was in part because of their cost. Computer’s were a luxury and were used in an extremely economic fashion.

As we move forward in time, we see more choices in both hardware and software. We also see the availability of converging technogies. No longer are you tied to 1 vendor. Instead, you have multiple vendors products that we must make work together.

As we move forward we also begin to see lower prices, and faster systems. Now, it’s easier to have more than 1 computer and in many cases you no longer can run everything on 1 system. You have incompatible software products.

As we approach ERA 5 (today) we find we have a lot of fast computers, but they are relatively under utilized. The average Intel based server today has 2 3.4G CPU’s and is only 10% used. This leaves 90% of the systems resources unused. This high availibility of computer power, but relative low use creates the Infrastructure Chasm.

Continued in Part 2….