Review: Infrastructure 2011 Reality vs. Prediction
Experton Group was quite on target with its predictions for 2011 in this area. IT executives attacked their data center infrastructure initiatives both globally and locally, with the aim of consolidation, standardization and virtualization. This approach allowed leading companies to contain IT expenses and move workloads to core computing facilities while closing down those that were less environmentally and financially justifiable. Moreover, an increasing number of leading-edge IT executives have begun efforts to restructure their operations with the objective of becoming more agile, leaner, and more efficient.
Cloud computing has turned the corner and become a mainstream concept for targeted IT solutions. Most IT organizations are now implementing or planning on using clouds somewhere within their operations – private, public and hybrid models are on the table. In addition, virtualized pools of resources – networks, servers and storage – are gaining ground now that vendors are starting to provide automated tools to enable and manage pooled resources.
Companies continue to consolidate data centers to cut costs and gain efficiencies. Executives are better managing their performance, using tools such as performance per square foot or per watt as well as servers/administrator and terabytes per administrator. In the latter case, newer storage management tools have enabled companies to make massive strides in terabytes/administrator. Where once in the distributed environment a company struggled to get to 1 TB/administrator, today some companies are able to reach 100 times that or more.