Agile data centres win

By Vicky Burger for Gartner

Johannesburg, 25 Oct 2007

Over the next five years, agility will become a significant factor in the measurement of data centre excellence, according to Gartner.

The analyst firm defines agility as the ability of an organisation to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively.

Gartner adds that an agile business requires an agile data centre and necessitates an infrastructure that is designed to allow this.

Tom Bittman, Gartner VP and analyst, says: "Agility is the right strategic balance between speed and operational efficiency. An agile data centre is one that can handle exceptions effectively and learn from them to improve standards and processes."

Virtualisation will play an increasingly important role in enabling agility, by minimising the number of servers, space, power and cooling demands, says Bittman.

The majority of large organisations have started to virtualise their servers, says Bittman. "Gartner estimates that only 6% of the addressable market is penetrated by virtualisation. It is predicted that this will rise to 11% by 2009, and the number of virtualised machines deployed on servers will grow from 1.2 million to 4 million."

Bittman explains that while virtualisation is about consolidation, it also includes moving resource management from individual servers to pools and can increase server deployment speeds by up to 30 times. It enables infrastructure automation and will help accelerate the trend toward automation of IT operations processes, he adds.

Gartner warns that tools alone are not a substitute for a good process and recommends that organisations planning or implementing virtualisation should firstly balance virtualised and unvirtualised services and look at the investments and trade-offs.

"They should re-use virtualised services across the portfolio and understand the impact of virtualisation on the project`s life cycle, especially in relation to licensing, support and testing constraints," he adds.

Bittman says organisations should also focus on management tools and their impact on operations. "Companies should look at emerging standards for the management and virtualisation."