2010: will a new decade bring new data centre paradigms?
In Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series, the appearance of a mysterious monolith in prehistoric times is responsible for awakening intelligence in humankind. By three million years later, human ingenuity has sprouted the ability to awaken intelligence in silicon, as evidenced by ‘Hal’ - sci-fi’s most notorious artificially intelligent computer. In Clarke’s world, the year 2010 finds humans not only dealing with the aftermath of artificial intelligence gone awry, but still struggling to understand the nature of human ingenuity and intelligence. As 2010 opens in our world, it’s no surprise that intelligence and ingenuity are key themes that run through four major trends we’ll see in the enterprise data centre for 2010 and the decade beyond: Data centre virtualization Physical servers and fat storage that suck power and drink cooling resources are deftly humming themselves into obsolescence. Not only is data centre equipment evolving to become more energy-efficient (thanks, in part, to the ‘greening’ of the data centre), but the advent of the virtual machine and thin provisioning have forever changed IT and will continue to do so. In the coming year we’ll see the tentacles of virtualization continue to pervade nearly every aspect of the data centre as technological development focuses on delivering the necessary intelligence and flexibility to enhance virtual data centre efficiency and agility. This means autonomic storage that eliminates human (manual) dependency when it comes to configuration, monitoring, and optimisation; the convergence of SAN topologies such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or traditional Fibre Channel and iSCSI; and the integration of primary storage capacity reduction technologies into the virtual data centre. Cloud computing So far there has been much hype around cloud computing and as the market continues to turn we will see the cloud continue to draw much attention and momentum. But 2010 is also the year that we are going to see the real players emerge from among a sea of vendors with ‘me too’ marketing campaigns. There is indeed a new crop of cloud innovators that are getting it right—with cloud-intelligent, hyper-flexible, mega-customisable gear designed with this new model in mind. Case in point: agile, intelligent storage arrays armed with active-mesh, quad-node architectures and autonomic management features that give storage the power to think for itself. Terremark’s vCloud Express and Datapipe’s Stratosphere - both of which enable users to purchase cloud services over the Web with a credit card for just pennies per hour with no minimum commitment - gives us a brief glimpse into one of the many new worlds that such innovations will unlock, and not just for the enterprise. A showdown between best-of-breed versus vertical-stack infrastructure With all the merger and acquisition activity in 2009, now more than ever it is indeed possible to fulfil all IT infrastructure needs using a single mega-vendor - servers, storage, networking, and even middleware. Never has the IT landscape looked more like something straight out of the 1970s. While this move appears to be a boon for those organizations that lack basic integration capabilities within their IT departments (e.g. SMB/SME segments), it appears to be in direct conflict with the business model of cloud computing. The cloud computing paradigm creates a new profit pool. For cloud service providers to compete among themselves with essentially the same vertical stack infrastructure would reduce their ability to differentiate, and could result in acquiescing pricing leverage to their infrastructure providers. Instead, these service providers are more likely to choose best of breed servers, storage, networks, and middleware—and then leverage in-house integration expertise to deliver highly differentiated cloud services. In this way, pricing leverage and control of the profit pool stays with them, versus their supply chain. Next-gen backup and recovery No 2010 prediction piece would be complete without a ‘tape is dead’ mantra. Economic pressure combined with faster, more efficient disk-based backup and data archiving will force tape increasingly into the great archive of antiquated IT technologies. Speed is the key - not just in terms of backup, but also recovery - which is why we’ll see more solutions that look like tape but don’t act like tape, at least not in terms of their velocity. Combine this with other innovations such as smart deduplication and things become even more interesting. For example, the possibilities for smart corporate-wide blending of deduplication and storage capabilities - through server-based appliances that intelligently dedupe data before backing it up - will revolutionise backup and recovery, but may still be a few years down the road. The above trends and paradigm shifts will be will be in full swing as we look back at the close of 2010. Data centre virtualization, cloud computing in its various forms, best-of-breed infrastructures, and next generation backup and recovery technologies are all poised to deliver greater innovation and value to users who have been constrained by tough economic times. We have seen no slow-down in the creation of data despite a challenging global macro-economic climate. Businesses are starved for IT innovation that will provide them with new and creative ways to maintain competitiveness and profitability. These major trends, and others, will enable business to leverage technology to their best advantage. I look forward to this same time next year when I get to take a fresh look at trends for the data centre as it continues its odyssey.
•Date: 18th Dec 2009• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
