Today's DataCentre

META, "The Data Center of the Future," March 2003

There are many trends and technologies developing today that will shape the DataCentre of the future. Standardization, utility and dynamic computing models, and scaling-out vs. scaling-up are important discussions for organizations of any size. However, there are a number of opportunities and challenges that IT organizations currently face that must be addressed not only to meet today's needs, but to prepare them for the future. And, of course, this must be done while managing data growth, dealing with security, staffing and training, managing migrations and upgrades, and understanding new regulations.

This guide is designed to provide information that helps organisations manage, plan and benefit from DataCentre technologies and transitions currently underway as well as those planned for the future.

Today's IT Challenges

IT organisations currently have an opportunity to address these issues through systems management processes and products, server and storage consolidation, virtualisation, and clustering technologies that improve utilisation and performance.

More than 90 percent of all server units sold today are standard x86 servers.

The performance, reliability and value of x86 servers has enabled productivity gains and/or cost reductions for organisations of all sizes worldwide.

With these benefits, however, have also come challenges.

Management of these systems is a major operational challenge. Servers and storage systems must be deployed, changes and updates made, and the systems regularly monitored for health and status. Change management has become one of the top issues facing IT organisations todayit is a function of the number of servers and storage devices multiplied by the number of updates and changes being made by the hardware, operating system and application vendors. With the number of changes each of these different vendors is regularly making, change management has become a full-time job in many organisations.

Another challenge is maximising overall system performance and utilisation.

As organisations grow they require additional performance from existing assets.

However, there has been a one application = one server reality that results in a large number of servers underutilising their true processing capacity.

To be continued...