Dell, Gartner unveil top predictions for data center technologies

MANILA, Philippines - The data center is evolving and with cloud computing emerging as key driver for new deployments, most organizations are looking to revamp their IT architectures.

Dell is predicting data center spending to continue to rebound, though it said customers would place added emphasis on efficiency, automation and best-of-breed solutions.

Craig Slattery, director for enterprise platforms and solutions marketing for the Asia-Pacific and Japan of Dell Global B.V. (Singapore Branch), said in a recent Dell-Gartner media briefing on the top data center technologies for 2011 that efficiency is what will be organizations will be driving toward.

“To talk about the virtual era, virtualization is really the inflection point to drive new levels of efficiency. Efficiency in an organization is highly flexible, has low capital expenditure and has been optimized the IT manager. That is how you drive data center efficiency,” he said.

As enterprises turn to IT to deliver competitive advantage and become more aware of the flexibility and productivity of cloud-based architectures, enterprise data is ballooning beyond expectation.

“That means we will have think about the huge amount of data that we will be storing and new applications and services that will come along,” said Errol Rasit, principal analyst of Gartner Research (Data Center Systems). “So it means for IT managers should look closely at storage management.”

This highlights the importance of the cloud environment as Dell projects scale-out storage architectures coupled with better data management solutions to drive significant growth in storage in 2011.

“Customers will turn their focus to data center automation, provisioning and the orchestration of both hardware and applications in multi-hypervisor environments,” Gartner said.

“Early adopters will begin deployments of flattened networks, focusing on optimizing around virtualization and managing from the edge of the network, using either proprietary vendor methods or early standards like TRILL and Openflow,” it added.

Gartner affirmed that chief information officers (CIOs) think that the next four years will be the period when organizations will support more than half of their transactions on a cloud infrastructure.

“We are already moving of thinking to the cloud environment, whether public or private. Virtualization is the key enabler of the private cloud. We are seeing customers start building the private cloud,” Rasit said.

However, Dell and Gartner executives are one in saying that while the industry will see the adoption of more private and public cloud solutions, debate will continue on the best approach - open architectures or closed, appliance models.

Dell believes that application managers are going to be new IT superheroes. “They will increasingly help hardware administrators determine the type of solutions to purchase,” Gartner said.

In the Asia-Pacific, around 40 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will invest in cloud this year, Gartner said. The region will actually surpass North America to become the biggest region for enterprise spending worldwide.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is also projected to grow from nine percent of total enterprise applications software spending in 2009 to 14 percent in 2014. SaaS enterprise application revenues will also more than double during this timeframe, or 15.3 percent of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014.

“We are going through this process of evolution,” said Rasit, adding that since data centers can consume 40-100 times more energy than the offices they support, it is also high time to think of lowering energy consumption through green IT.