Clouds, Virtualization And Fabric Convergence Top Data Center Agendas

The data center is changing and bringing new opportunities, with private and public cloud adoption, server virtualization and data center unified fabric, as well as increasing challenges with security and data governance, according to the final installment of the Cisco Connected World Report. The report, conducted by InsightExpress and representing 100 IT respondents in each of 13 countries, including China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, also found that IT professionals are creating new job opportunities through collaboration among teams in the data center. The findings are consistent with recent reports from both Gartner and IDC.

According to Cisco's Craig Huitema, director of data center solutions, there were no real surprises in the study. The top three data center concerns were security, performance and uptime/reliability. The business trends expected to affect the data center most during the next three years are the increase in data and applications, security risk management, the need to reduce costs, and distributed, mobile or remote employees.

Hitema says one interesting change in the data center is the way technology shifts are causing organizational changes: "New careers, new certifications and new jobs are being created as the next round of convergence continues in the data center."

Almost half the respondents (48 percent) expect to see new career opportunities as a result of cross-training and collaboration among formerly separate teams. A total of 43 percent said they expect new training and certification programs for IT managers, and 41 percent responded that they expect new job descriptions and titles such as data center architect and data center manager.

While only 18 percent of respondents say they are using cloud computing today, 34 percent plan to, and 88 percent predicted they would be storing data and applications in private or public clouds within the next three years. Only 29 percent of the respondents have more than half their production servers virtualized, and only 28 percent have more than half of non-production servers virtualized.The top data center priorities for the next three years are to improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).

Last week IDC reported that cloud services, mobile computing and social networking will mature and coalesce in 2011 and create the new mainstream for the IT industry ("IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the New Mainstream"). "In 2011, we expect to see these transformative technologies make the critical transition from early adopter status to early mainstream adoption," says Frank Gens, senior VP and chief analyst at IDC. "As a result, we'll see the IT industry revolving more and more around the build-out and adoption of this next dominant platform, characterized by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics. In addition to creating new markets and opportunities, this restructuring will overthrow nearly every assumption about who the industry's leaders will be and how they establish and maintain leadership."

What's most significant, notes Gens, is that these disruptive technologies are being integrated with each other--cloud with mobile, mobile with social networking, social networking with "big data" and real-time analytics. "As a result, these once-emerging technologies can no longer be invested in, or managed, as sandbox efforts around the edges of the market," says Gens. "Instead, they are rapidly becoming the market itself and must be addressed accordingly."

In October Gartner revealed the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011, including cloud computing, social communications and collaboration, fabric-based infrastructure and computers. The company expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloud-sourcing decisions and management. By 2016, Gartner says, social technologies, including collaboration, will be integrated with most business applications. Finally, it says, the fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model--which abstracts physical resources, processor cores, network bandwidth and links, and storage onto pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM)--will be another one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011.