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Gartner Data Centre Conference 2011

Posted on Dec 23, 2011 | Tags: | Comments (0)

I've picked out a few topics that give a feel for some of the trends Gartner highlighted and resulted in some of the most active discussions.

Prediction: The Impact of Cloud

We are in the midst of the next stage of the industrialisation of IT. The gives IT organisations a great chance to play an ever growing role in providing solutions for wider business issues in an agile and cost-effective manner without the large up-front investments which have thwarted projects in the past.

The predictions are that 60% of cloud adoption will be the redeploying of existing applications, virtually unchanged, and while there will be mass adoption in the coming years, it is estimated that 80% of organisations will use only private or hybrid cloud, there will not be any mass move to purely public clouds for enterprises.

The ultimate "pure" cloud solutions are applications which will automatically scale on demand to cope with changes in data volumes. While the benefits of this are clear the hurdles lie in building applications which meet this requirement - this type of functionality is not an easy add-on to existing applications but is a fundamental architectural decision. The result is a prediction from Gartner that less than 2% of enterprise applications will be burstable over the next 5 years.

Advice: Transparency of Providers

With this mindset there is a smooth transition into considering the best partners to work with to deliver the IT infrastructure. While of course I'd say that you can't top brightsolid in this regard (!), Gartner brought forward some areas to consider when making this decision:

• Evaluate your options and choose the partners that are right for your situation but always have an exit plan in place, cloud standards aren't yet mature enough to make it easy to move between providers but you should have an idea of what a change would mean for you.
• Look for transparency in the provider you select: understand their company finances to ensure that are around for the long haul; confirm that they own their data centre facilities, or at least understand who does; have a view on the underlying infrastructure that is used - the importance of having the right hardware hasn't disappeared overnight; and confirm their Security and DR practices match what you require for your business.
• Finally it's always worth having a view on the complexity of what you are proposing, particularly if you are considering doing deployment in-house. For example, optimising MIcrosoft Exchange 2010 on VMWare involves configuring 115 different parameters, resulting in millions of combinations, to give the best results. Only commit to an in-house deployment if you are clear on what's involved in delivering what you are looking for.

One to Watch: Fabric Computing

Fabric Computing has been used as a term for the last 15 years where it saw early adoption primarily in the academic community. It's now starting to see early moves in the enterprise and is certainly a trend worth keeping on the radar.

The term refers to a set of compute, storage, memory and I/O components joined through fibre interconnect and pooled to be used on demand.

Many see it as a natural extension of Cloud because of the benefits of having huge compute resources available but with the added flexibility of less defined configurations and the benefit of being able to dynamic reconfigure.

As always the challenge now will be to build an enterprise solution which can cost-effectively solve real business problems. With numerous vendors working in this space it should be an interesting one to see how things develop over the next 12 months.

At brightsolid we're continuing to focus on giving our customers the enterprise-class Cloud solutions they can rely on, with a particular focus on security, flexibility and reliability. As always get in touch if you'd like to hear more about how we could help your organisations or follow us on twitter @brightsolid_tec