Viva Las Vegas & Los Data Centers!
I’m currently here in Las Vegas attending Gartner’s Data Center conference. It’s day two and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the sessions so far. In particular I thought yesterday’s keynote was very good and I wanted to share my notes from the talk.
The presentation was entitled, “Infrastructure and Operations: Charting a course for the coming decade” and was delivered by David Cappuccio. In his talk, David walked us through the “10 Trends to watch carefully.”
10 Trends to watch — Carefully
Virtualization
- Virtualize beyond servers: Desktops, network, storage, Hardware
- Desktop virtualization is a very hot topic right now (thick client image, thin client delivery model),
Data Deluge
- Estimate enterprise data growth over the next 5 years is 650%
- The surprising figure is that 80% of this will be unstructured data and this will be a big issue.
- Attack with virtualization, de-duping…
Energy and Green IT
- CIO’s KPI goes from “keep it running” to “keep it running, but make it efficient”
Consumerism and Social Software
- Twitter grew by 1,382% in ’08, 62% of that growth came from 39-51 year olds.
- Advice for CIOs: start paying attention to what’s going on in this space and get involved. It won’t go away.
Unified Collaboration and communications
- # of text msgs sent in the last 24 hours exceeded the total population of the planet (and this stat is a year old!).
- Texting isn’t a convenience it’s a way of life
Mobile and Wireless: It’s all about the apps
- Mobile apps will need new servers for delivery
- App delivery is highly complex
- The management tools in this space are immature
- This is the next target for virtualization
- Apps are typically priced around $1.99 (when they’re not free), think of how much the same app would have cost if you had to buy it for your PC.
System Density
- Operating expense (energy cost) of current x86 system will exceed its purchase price in three years
- Energy cost per year for 2 typical racks is $105,000
- Blades are leading toward componentized servers
- Today blades are proprietary server infrastructure in a chassis solution
- This is evolving into a componentized datacenter in a chassis solution (but still proprietary)
Mash-ups and Enterprise Portals
- These are private cloud enablers
- They allow for rapid/flexible development
- There are creeping standards, but it is largely uncontrolled
- Need to set clear standards but also encourage innovation
Cloud
- Private clouds improve agility and will dominate
- 70-80% of investments over the next 5 years will be in private clouds
- Advice: ignore the hype, focus on the results
- Focus on service levels
- Common services are available now and may reduce operating costs
- Managing cloud sourcing: Service brokers
- Represent an evolution of today’s SI’s and VARs
- They will orchestrate cloud providers to meet an organizations needs
- They will be small enterprises and industry specific
- Managing cloud sourcing: Dynamic Sourcing Team
- Large enterprises
- New team, new skills(business- and IT-savvy)
- Manages day-to-day sourcing decisions
- Advice
- Evaluate commodity services you provide and what can move to the cloud
- Evaluate cloud delivery model for internal use
- Categorize applications/services based on SLAs and risk before proceeding
Stay tuned, more from the conference to come.
Pau for now…
Posted by Barton George 
