I’m currently here in Las Vegas attending Gartner’s Data Center conference.  It’s day two and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the sessions so far.  In particular I thought yesterday’s keynote was very good and I wanted to share my notes from the talk.

The presentation was entitled, “Infrastructure and Operations: Charting a course for the coming decade” and was delivered by David Cappuccio.  In his talk, David walked us through the “10 Trends to watch carefully.”

10 Trends to watch — carefully

Virtualization:

• Virtualize beyond servers: Desktops, network, storage, Hardware
• Desktop virtualization is a very hot topic right now (thick client image, thin client delivery model)

Data Deluge:

• Estimate enterprise data growth over the next 5 years is 650%
• The surprising figure is that 80% of this will be unstructured data and this will be a big issue.
• Attack with virtualization, de-duping…

Energy and Green IT:

• CIO’s KPI goes from “keep it running” to “keep it running, but make it efficient”

Consumerism and Social Software:

• Twitter grew by 1,382% in ’08, 62% of that growth came from 39-51 year olds.
• Advice for CIOs: start paying attention to what’s going on in this space and get involved.  It won’t go away.

Unified Collaboration and communications:

• # of text msgs sent in the last 24 hours exceeded the total population of the planet (and this stat is a year old!)
• Texting isn’t a convenience it’s a way of life

Mobile and Wireless:  It’s all about the apps:

• Mobile apps will need new servers for delivery
• App delivery is highly complex
• The management tools in this space are immature
• This is the next target for virtualization
• Apps are typically priced around $1.99 (when they’re not free), think of how much the same app would have cost if you had to buy it for your PC

System Density:

• Operating expense (energy cost) of current x86 system will exceed its purchase price in three years
• Energy cost per year for 2 typical racks is $105,000
• Blades are leading toward componentized servers
• Today blades are proprietary server infrastructure in a chassis solution
• This is evolving into a componentized datacenter in a chassis solution (but still proprietary)

Mash-ups and Enterprise Portals:

• These are private cloud enablers
• They allow for rapid/flexible development
• There are creeping standards, but it is largely uncontrolled
• Need to set clear standards but also encourage innovation

Cloud:

• Private clouds improve agility and will dominate
• 70-80% of investments over the next 5 years will be in private clouds
• Advice: ignore the hype, focus on the results
• Focus on service levels
• Common services are available now and may reduce operating costs
• Managing cloud sourcing:  Service brokers
  • Represent an evolution of today’s SI’s and VARs
  • They will orchestrate cloud providers to meet an organizations needs
  • They will be small enterprises and industry specific

• Managing cloud sourcing:  Dynamic Sourcing Team
  • Large enterprises
  • New team, new skills(business- and IT-savvy)
  • Manages day-to-day sourcing decisions
• Advice:
  • Evaluate commodity services you provide and what can move to the cloud
  • Evaluate cloud delivery model for internal use
  • Categorize applications/services based on SLAs and risk before proceeding

Stay tuned, more from the conference to come.

Pau for now…