Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center

Unified Communications
By 2010, 80 percent of unified communications components will be purchased as part of a broader product suite. Unified communications functionality draws from five core markets, each of which is evolving toward convergence in its own way. The key markets are: voice mail; PBX (which is evolving toward IP PBX), e-mail and calendaring; conferencing and collaboration; and IM and presence. Unified communications also draws functions from some tangential markets.

The migration of various specialized protocols to IP is one of the major enabling and driving factors. At the same time, previously analog signals-

Automating the IT management process remains a key objective for IT executives focused on driving cost and complexity out of IT operations. Adoption continues to gain momentum and will grow as enterprises’ maturity provides the process knowledge, the need and the appropriate expectation to meet the challenge.

A computing fabric is the evolution of server design. Look for fabric-based servers to be offered by several vendors by the end of the decade. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit specific needs. The result will be an increase in use through a decrease in wasted resources.

Data services format, standardize, distribute and provide access to data. Metadata management pervades the reference model that enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Most organizations will achieve metadata management in stages, choosing to build incrementally. For example, customer-centric companies may use customer data integration solutions to address customer management issues or to comply with specific regulations.

Configuration management databases, or CMDBs, will continue to play critical roles in enterprise IT operations infrastructures, driven by a wide range of influences. Today, dependency mapping tools bring new technological approaches to the long-standing science of discovery. These tools will continue to be developed to help IT operations establish, maintain, visualize and monitor logical application or service topology relationships and dependencies across systems.

Mashups mix content from multiple sources by using feeds from public APIs. An example is an application that mashes information from a real estate company’s Web site with a Web mapping interface from another site to show the location of area home listings. Mashing is a presentation layer approach to integration and composite applications that leverage Web technologies on both the consumer side (the browser) and the source side (Web feed protocols). Opportunistic applications are end-user-created composites based on an individual’s need or context.

Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. With the addition of automation technologies-

Web 2.0 companies are now focusing on the use of target applications in the enterprise, in addition to the public Web. Generally, social technologies are now mature; they have a wide reach; they are relatively easy to use and deploy; and they have the potential for positive impact on business activity.

IT managers are straining to provide power and cooling to handle racks consuming tens of thousands of watts, and there is increasing regulatory pressure around power usage and companies’ impact on the environment. This translates into a mix of market demand and customer pressure on technology providers, which have responded by putting a high priority on managing power and cooling.