Next generation data centers will not tolerate the inefficiencies of today. The data center of the future will do away with the physical ties that hold us back from meting top business priorities. Perhaps more importantly, nothing in the data center will be useless. Business decisions will drive application choices and policies. The applications will provide their requirements to the virtualized platform and that platform will instantly respond. The virtualized platform will consist of processors running at different speeds connected by network connections of different bandwidth and protocols and to storage and data that spans different storage systems on different continents. All components are disposable and will run at or near 100% utilization.
In the future, protection, security, and performance will be policy-driven and based on data in order to reduce cost and optimize the utilization of assets. Data will be moved from place to place and assigned changing attributes based on its lifecycle, requirements, and usefulness. Management and maintenance as we know will cease to exist.
According to recent ESG research, increasing server virtualization usage was the top overall IT priority facing organizations over the next 12-18 months (see Figure 1).1 Server virtualization is one of the key ingredient to building the data center of the future.
By Mark Bowker and Lauren Whitehouse