State of Technology: Evolving the Data Center

For years, Tim Hebert, COO of Atrion Networking, has been keeping a close eye on data-center developments from both IT vendors and customers. And after a long drought in spending, he likes what he's seeing now. Hebert says customers are once again looking to innovation as a way to trim data-center size, lower power consumption and heat, gain utilization efficiencies and turn IT into more of a service. And the vendors are climbing over one another to fill demand, with a raft of data-center initiatives coming from the likes of APC, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, VMware and others.

Hebert's not alone in his optimism. In VARBusiness' recent quarterly State of Technology survey (this one devoted to servers and storage), a high percentage of solution providers cited advances in hardware and software technologies, from blade servers to virtualization software, as a prime driver for sales in the coming year. And those technologies are laying the groundwork for even bigger changes to the data center in years to come, they say.

"Things have been changing drastically," says Hebert, whose Warwick, R.I., company hosts and operates cutting-edge data centers for customers such as K-B Toys and its 650 stores across the country. "The major trends we're seeing are, No. 1, server consolidation, lots of blade-server implementations and storage solutions designed to centralize the footprint of the data center."

Add to that the burgeoning market for virtualization software, multicore chips and the growing roles of VARs as day-to-day stewards of their customers' data centers--both remotely and in a hosting capacity--and the stage is being set for a new era of data-center refurbishment.

"I think you'll see partners taking a bigger role in [data center] services and a lesser one in the lower-level tasks of setting up and configuring the box," says Paul Miller, vice president in charge of industry-standard servers and blade systems at HP. "Just as data center admins will have to work at a more strategic level, leading-edge partners will have to take a holistic approach as opposed to just fulfilling an order."

But getting smarter about providing higher-level services is only half of what VARs must do to be successful. They also have to bone up on the technologies that will fuel future data centers and then apply their own value-add to the solutions.

Data-Center Economics

Many of the shifts in the data center are being driven by business demands--growing volumes of digital data, legislation-compliance requirements, labor arbitrage, more efficient power usage and cooling technologies.

With the overall economics of the data center being as important as its constituent technology pieces, increasing each server's utilization will be very much front-of-mind for administrators. Virtualization should help that cause. Most servers are now being utilized at only 5 percent to 20 percent of their capacity. But as more software gets delivered as a service among servers, most of the remaining servers will be working at 80 percent to 90 percent capacity over the next three or four years.

Virtualization not only will allow VARs to dramatically reduce the number of servers in a data center; it also will virtualize specific functions of a centralized server operating system or application, allowing servers to more efficiently run far-flung pieces of an enterprise. The technology will enable larger companies to set up second and third data centers for disaster recovery at a fraction of what it would normally cost to do so.

"Virtualization is a huge element today," says Lewis Johnson, president of Siwel Consulting. "There's an increasing amount of interest in it...Even though the software in VMware is expensive, when you balance out that cost, you can run 10 servers on one machine. It's a very attractive process."

From IBM's perspective, the evolution of the data center is all about simplification, and that gives virtualization a starring role. At a recent technology launch in New York, Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Systems & Technology Group, told attendees that "virtualization is an important component" of simplifying large data centers.

When it comes to virtualization, one can't ignore the considerable efforts of VMware, which has commanded a strong presence in the space and recently released a free version of its VMware Server to help seed the marketplace. Microsoft, which offers a competing product, called Virtual Server, plans in 2007 to bake its HyperVisor virtualization technology directly into Windows Vista, pushing virtualization capabilities beyond even the data center to everyday users.