Agility will be number one issue for data centres by 2012 – and virtualisation is key
1 min read
The next five years will see agility become the primary measure of data-centre excellence, according to analyst Gartner – helped by emerging technologies around intelligence and self management.
Speaking at the company’s Data Centre Summit 2007 in London yesterday, Tom Bittman, Gartner vice-president and analyst advised that by 2012 virtualisation will be the most significant factor in data centres – greatly reducing the number of servers, space, power and cooling demands.
“An agile data centre will handle exceptions effectively, but also learn from exceptions to improve standards and processes,” he said. “Agility will become a major business differentiator in a connected world. Business agility also requires agility in the data centre – which is difficult as many of the technologies for improving the intelligence and self-management of IT are very immature.”
He added that within data centres, agility – the ability of an organisation to sense environmental change and respond efficiently – should be measured in terms that make sense to the business, such as the time and cost to deploy new servers, to install new software or to fix a problem.
No company can be truly agile if its infrastructure is not designed from the ground up to enable that quality. Achieving that means adopting virtualisation – and going way beyond the estimated 6% take-up so far (which Gartner believes will rise to 11% by 2009).
“Virtualisation changes virtually everything,” sais Bittman. Why? Because it’s not just about achieving consolidation, but also transitioning resource management from individual servers to pools, thus increasing server deployment speeds by up to 30 times.
However, Gartner warned that tools alone are not a substitute for a good process, and made several recommendations, including:
When looking at IT projects, balance the virtualised and un-virtualised services, looking at the trade-offs;
Reuse virtualised services across the portfolio – every new project does not warrant a new technology;
Understand the impact of virtualisation on the project’s lifecycle – meaning look for licensing, support and testing constraints;
Focus not just on virtualisation platforms, but on the management tools and their impact on operations;
Look at emerging standards for management and virtualisation.
