Lilliput meets brobdingnagian: Data center systems management through mobile devices

In this paper, we put forward the notion that systems management for large masses of virtual machines in data centers is going to be done differently in the short to medium term future-through smart phones and through controlled crowdsourcing to a variety of experts within an organization, rather than dedicated system administrators alone. We lay out the research and practitioner challenges this model raises and give some preliminary solution directions that are being developed, here at IBM and elsewhere.