At the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo, David Cappuccio, managing vice
president and chief of research for the Infrastructure teams with
Gartner, said the Top 10 Trends show how IT is changing in that many of
them in the past been outside the traditional purview of IT, but they
will all affect how IT does its job in the future.
The Top 10 Trends and their impact, briefly include:
1 The evolution of virtualization: Cappuccio says
virtualization will ultimately drive more companies to treat IT like a
business. The danger during the next few years will be in following a
specific vendor’s vision, though it is unlikely that any one vendor’s
vision will prevail. Users should have their own visions of architecture
control, and build toward it with a constantly updated strategic plan.
2 Big data, patterns and analytics: Unstructured
data will grow some 80% over the course of the next five years, creating
a huge IT challenge. Technologies such as in-line deduplication,
automated tiering of data to get the most efficient usage patterns per
kilowatt, and flash or solid-state drives for higher-end performance
optimization, will increase in importance over the next few years,
Cappuccio said. Analytics and other systems to monitor for recurring
data patterns that could develop into money making applications will
also be important.
3. Energy efficiency and monitoring: The power issue
has moved up the food corporate food chain, Cappuccio said. Nascent
tools are beginning to roll out that can use analytic tools to watch
power usage on a variety of levels. With the increased attention given
to power consumption, it has become apparent that many systems are
highly underutilized. At low utilization levels, they use a high
percentage of their total energy draw. An average x86 server that is
turned on, but idle, will draw upward of 65% of its nameplate wattage,
for example. IT organizations need a clear inventory of what compute
resources are doing and what workloads there is the potential for
significant waste of energy.
4. Context aware apps: The big question here how to do something smart to take advantage of smartphones.
Gartner has in the past said context-based computing will go beyond the
business intelligence applications and truly make a unified
communications environment possible by bringing together data culled
from social networks and mobile-devices.
5. Staff retention and retraining: Here the idea is
developing a plan to get people excited about their jobs enough to
stay. And we’ll need is as starting in 2011 an average of 10,000 baby
boomers will be eligible to retire every day for the next 19 years,
Cappuccio said. Loyalty to one company is not a quality found in new
workers.
6. Social networks: Affordable and accessible
technology has let individuals and communities come together in a new
way – with a collective voice – to make statements about our
organizations, the products/services we deliver and how we deliver them,
Cappuccio said. The collective is made up of individuals, groups,
communities, mobs, markets and firms that shape the direction of society
and business. The collective is not new, but technology has made it
more powerful -and enabled change to happen more rapidly Cappuccio said.
The collective is just beginning to have an impact on business
operations and strategies but most organizations do not have a plan for
enabling or embracing it. Ignoring social networking is not an option, Cappuccio said.
7. Consumerization: The key trend here is the fact
that new application types will be developed to address mobile users but
they won’t be desktop replacement applications. Still, a secure,
well-defined strategy needs to be put into place to take advantage of
this development, Cappuccio said.
8. Compute per square foot: Virtualization is one
of the most critical components being used to increase densities and
vertically scale data centers. If used wisely, average server
performance can move from today’s paltry 7% to 12% average to 40% to
50%, yielding huge benefits in floor space and energy savings. Two
issues that need to be considered going forward are the number of cores
per server — four- and eight-core systems are becoming common, and 16
cores will be common within two years – and overall data center energy
trends. IT will also have to address things like performance/licensing,
Cappuccio said
9. Cloud computing: While cost is a potential
benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits of cloud computing are
built-in elasticity and scalability. As certain IT functions
industrialize and become less customized, such as email, there are more
possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing,
according to Cappuccio.
10. Fabrics: Gartner defines this infrastructure
convergence as: The vertical integration of server, storage, and network
systems and components with element-level management software that lays
the foundation to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and
dynamically. Systems put forth so far by Cisco and HP will unify
network control but are not there yet.
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