TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

The 10 Top Trends in the Data Center

Eric Lundquist | Date: 09-17-09 | Comments

With the economic cloud lifting, lots of new technologies and products being unveiled and experienced executives ready to make decisions, the next 12 months will set the direction of the data center for years.

Recently I had the opportunity to moderate two e-seminars as part of a virtual trade show in a 2009 State of the Data Center Series. You can view those presentations here, but I thought I would try to cull out the top 10 trends as identified by the panelists. The panels included a top industry analyst, two expert lab analysts, a CIO at a major company and a senior vice president at a key bank, so these folks know what they are talking about. As a quick summary, I'd say the next 12 months will be as important in the data center as any previous year in my experience. With the economic cloud lifting, lots of new technologies and productsbeing unveiled and experienced executives ready to make decisions, the next 12 months will set the direction of the data center for years.

I'll divide the trends by the speakers. First up is Julius Neudorfer, CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies.

1. 8,760. That number represents the number of hours in a year in a 24x365 data center operation. While hours are constant, server and power loads will fluctuate much more widely due to the advent of technologies such as virtualization. Power management will become a key factor as more executives realize that over the typical three-year life of a server, power costs exceed the server purchase price. The days of overcapacity with little or no power management are over.

2. Data Center brokerage. As Neudorfer stated, "Smart" Advanced power management systems will interactively begin to broker and negotiate power requests and rates from IT equipment to the UPS, PDUs and cooling systems as well as power utilities.

Next up is Jim Rapoza, chief technology analyst, eWEEK Labs.

3. Enterprise customers have often been slow to adopt new technologies, but the cost and computing advantages of new technologies may change past trends. The advent of solid state drives in servers offers fast access at low power, liquid cooling - long a promise - is ready to find a place in the server room and Google's use of direct current, disposable, low-cost servers may change the paradigm for enterprise data centers as well.

4. The advent of cloud computing, and in particular, private clouds exclusive to the enterprise, are now possible and will have a profound effect on data center architecture.

Next up is Cameron Sturdevant, technical director, eWEEK Labs.

5. Windows Server 2008, VMware's vSphere 4, new Nehalem processors from Intel and the entrance of Cisco into the server business has provided a full agenda for Labs to evaluate. While some technologies seem to always reside in the future, those listed products are available now and should be on every IT executives evaluation list.

6. While technology continues to advance, IT budgets remain constrained and IT managers will continue to be faced with the task of doing more with less. Breaking the cycle of 70 percent of the budgets being eaten up by maintenance will allow IT managers to look at new options such as PAAS (platform as a service) and the emerging standard of OVM (open virtual machine).

Mike Capone is the CIO for financial operations giant ADP. Any executive who thinks green initiatives are only for small and midsize companies should look at what Mike and his team have accomplished. Here are two highlights that also reflect data center trends.

7. Consolidating 20 data centers to two. This was a huge project that required rethinking data center design and getting vendors to shift from pushing power to power efficiency. "We have proved the business advantage of applying 'Green Technologies' in the data center," stated Capone. Building a business case for data center consolidation and getting vendors to help build the products and services to implement the consolidation is a major trend.

8. The next steps for ADP and information technology include: a truly virtual data center, approaching other technology areas outside the data center, new initiatives (such as home shoring) for better resource utilization and next generation video communication to reduce physical travel.

Bob Culver, the senior vice president of Technology Facilities for the Wells Fargo Company, has been in the forefront of new data center initiatives in a period of economic turmoil, especially for the banking industry.

9. Measuring success. During his presentation, Bob provided an informative overview of process charting and data collection. I think this may be one of the biggest trends in IT today. The ability to set a goal, measure your progress to the goal and refine the process in the next iteration is really the secret key to all successful information technology projects. In one project, Bob was able to consolidate 900 servers into 36 units.

10. Information technology prowess and data center consolidation and development as a key business driver. Wells Fargo is now in the process of incorporating the Wachovia operations. A key business trend is that successful business mergers will more and more require successful merged IT operations.