2010 Data Center Wish List: More Money, Virtualization, Cloud Computing

2010 Data Center Wish List: More Money, Virtualization, Cloud ComputingBy Jeffrey Burt

Thanks to the recession, IT spending dropped 5.2 percent in 2009, according to Gartner. Data center administrators would love to see those budgets grow in 2010, but Gartner is unsure whether that’s going to happen, predicting that spending will increase 3.3 percent in the upcoming year, but reporting that more than half of CIOs say they expect their budgets to remain flat or decline in 2010.

Virtualization is a key technology for helping data center managers reduce operating and capital expenses, consolidate resources and increase overall workloads without having to spend more for hardware. Now they’re looking at VMware’s vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and they’re looking for better tools for managing those virtualized environments.

More businesses are looking to deploy desktop virtualization to some degree, and they’re looking at not only VMware’s offering but also Citrix Systems’ XenDesktop 4 offering, a diagram of which is shown here.

Cloud computing holds the promise of driving down operational and capital costs, but data center managers are still looking for a cloud environment that they’re comfortable with, according to Endpoint Technologies Associates analyst Roger Kay.

Intel’s upcoming eight-core “Nehalem EX” Xeon processor, for servers with four or more sockets, offers a host of features that are designed to drive up performance, improve energy efficiency and drive down data center costs. The chip should start showing up in systems in early 2010.

IT professionals are telling TheInfoPro that while they may not deploy Cisco Systems’ all-in-one converged data center solution over the next six months, they are excited about the idea. Cisco, with its UCS, is only one of several OEMs-the others being Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM-looking to offer businesses converged data center solutions that offer greater server, storage, networking and management software integration.

IBM’s XIV high-end disk storage system is designed to make managing and administering tiered storage easier.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is a standard that is a key part of the drive for a unified networking fabric in the data center. However, according Jevin Jensen, IS manager at Mohawk Industries, what’s needed for greater data center consolidation is lossless FCOE.

More data center administrators are looking to water cooling technologies, such as IBM’s Rear Door Heat Exchanger, pictured, to help drive down cooling costs in their facilities.

Data center administrators will be upgrading their servers with Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2, pictured, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. Some also will be looking to migrate off of their Unix operating systems and to Linux, according to analysts.