The first keynote session of the Gartner Data Center conference in Las Vegas – an examination of the top 10 trends facing IT – was quite familiar, at least to those of us who attended Gartner Symposium a few weeks ago in Orlando. Gartner’s David Cappuccio went through the same list of trends, namely:
- Consumerization and the tablet
- The infinite data center
- IT consumption
- Context awareness
- Hybrid clouds
- Fabric data centers
- IT complexity
- Patterns and analytics
- The virtual enterprise
- Social networking
My friend Michael Cooney of Network World did a fine job covering all 10 out of the Orlando event, and I harped on the context awareness and consumerization items previously, so this time I’ll focus on a couple of others: virtualization and fabric data centers.
We have not yet begun to virtualize
Most IT folks look at virtualization as something we do to servers, Cappuccio said, but that’s only the “tip of the iceberg.” The next move is to things like hardware virtualization and, especially, desktop virtualization, where you host an image of a desktop in the data center that users view on their desktops. All data remains centralized, providing better security, and upgrades are far simpler, since you only need to deal with that single central image, not hundreds or thousands of individual desktops.
It all makes sense, as I’ve thought for years, but it doesn’t wind up saving money, as Cappuccio pointed out. That’s where I think desktop virtualization has hit the wall; these days, as GartnerCFO Chris LaFond pointed out in a separate session, you’ve got to show a quick ROI on IT projects or forget it. Given all the infrastructure that goes into desktop virtualization – mainly lots of high-powered servers and new desktop machines (albeit less expensive ones) along with a significant software investment and the desktop virtualization equation isn’t adding up for most customers.
In the mean time, though, customers should take another look at the servers they’ve already virtualized. If they’re running at 50% to 55% utilization, they’re under-virtualized, Cappuccio says. That means there’s room for further consolidation – and that’s an easy ROI case to make.
Finding value in fabrics
All that virtualization leads to lots of smaller, higher-density servers stuffed into racks that now require far more bandwidth than they previously did to deal with demand. Within four years, Gartner thinks bandwidth (as measured in I/O) per rack will increase 25 times – before considering storage and multimedia effects.
Enter fabric-based computing, which Gartner defines as “a set of compute, storage, memory and I/O components joined through a fabric interconnect and the software to configure and manage them.”
Companies such as Juniper offer large fabric switches that serve to “flatten” networks because they have lots and lots of high-speed ports. No longer do you need to have two or three tiers of switches, each aggregating traffic up to the next tier. The Juniper QFX Series switches, for example, can support more than 6,000 Gigabit Ethernet ports, enough to take care of the density issue for most companies.
Once everything it tied to the data center fabric, it becomes much easier to pool resources – both locally and globally –and to move workloads around as needs require, Cappuccio says. That enables companies to make best use of resource by time of day, such as shutting down some under-utilized servers at night and shifting the remaining burden to other servers, ideally those in a different time zone where the work day is still going strong.
