Welcome to Data Center Strategies

Hello everyone and welcome to Data Center Strategies – DCS for short -- Burton Group’s newest service offering. My name is Drue Reeves, Research Director for DCS and it is my pleasure to introduce the content and people who comprise our coverage for data centers.

As Richard stated in his blog, e-commerce and the information age have catalyzed the explosive growth of compute and storage resources within the data center. IT administrators are struggling to keep pace with the power, space, and storage requirements to accommodate business demands. In addition, data center management remains chaotic, forcing IT administrators to push aside other important tasks such as disaster recovery planning. Today, the data center has reached a breaking point. IT organizations are facing a cold-hard fact: data center infrastructure, power, space, and budget are limiting the ability to conduct business.

But, as the adage goes -- necessity is the mother of invention. New technologies such as server and storage virtualization are driving data center consolidation efforts. The cost-effectiveness of iSCSI is increasing SAN deployments and new power-thrifty processors are driving the “greening of the data center”. Are these technologies ready for the data center? We’ll find out, as we journey through DCS together.

The coverage areas for DCS are broken into four areas that we at Burton Group call “threads”.

• Compute: The compute thread includes data center technologies such as: server architectures and blades, high-available clusters, processor technology, server operating systems, compute grids and high performance computing. Analyst Andrew Kutz will be your guide through the DCS “compute” thread.
• Storage: The storage thread in an interesting one because it includes a wide range of topics from storage platforms and protocols to data management. Data management is the life-blood of IT. After all, “data” is the first word in “data center”. Keep a close eye here as Nik Simpson illuminates this strategic field.
• Virtualization: Could there be a hotter topic than virtualization? A few years ago, server and storage virtualization was considered bleeding edge, worthy of lab projects and testing environments. Today, virtualization is a serious – if not the foremost -- consideration for almost every data center consolidation project. Chris Wolf is the man covering virtualization for DCS.
• Operations and Management: Compute, storage and virtualization resources in the data center must be maintained, managed and placed into operational modes that create a flexible IT infrastructure for business. The O&M thread includes data center manageability, IT processes, power and cooling, outsourcing, co-lo, and operational modes such as disaster recovery that mold data center resources into IT operations. Richard and I are the primary analysts here but, all DCS analysts have some responsibility here.

Once again, welcome to DCS. Enjoy. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

Comments

[Jennifer]

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[Alex]

I'd like to see some discussion and attention paid to provisioning and automation irrespective of virtualization from a system perspective (include provisioning server, OS, Application, Network resources and storage in response to requirements). There is similar and just as big of a benefit to providing some of the same capabilities mentioned in the virtualization piece to non VM servers by having their personality on shared storage and mapping a server to that personality using iSCSI boot for example.

I'd also like to see some discussion about fabrics or the wire once concept using either Infiniband or 10GbE to reduce the numbers of wires and interface adapters, permitting more widespread use of blades without the I/O penalty typically associated with blades as a result of the limited I/O expansion options.

There are some thing that the HPC community does from an infrastructure perspective (resource grid - different from grid computing) that has a great deal of relevance and added significance to this topic.

Finally I'd like to see some discussion on how ITIL/ITSM or COBIT maps to some of these new capabilities along with the inevitable discussion of charging back for utilization or partial utilization of a resource as a result of temporary or seasonal demand.

Good start!

[michelle79]

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