The JBGeorge Tech Blog

This week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Gartner Data Center conference – got to see a lot of old friends, meet new friends, and learn a lot about what Gartner sees coming down the road. 

This year's Gartner Data Center Conference was held at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, NV

It was also a chance to talk to a number of folks about what’s happening at their own data centers, what they’re looking to solve, and what they’d like to see start happening in the industry.

Here are some key nuggets I walked away with – I’ll post again tomorrow with the rest:

• When it comes to implementing cloud, we cannot allow “20th century industrial models to sap 21st century innovation.” 
• There’s still not a good answer for failure remediation in the cloud – credit due to downtime is just not good enough.
• Expect the community cloud concept to continue to draw interest.  (Community clouds are clouds that service specific areas like banking or healthcare, where compliance, etc would be a requirement for its customers.)
• The next big business opportunity could be cloud brokers as the new systems integrators
• Great quote from Phil Dawson regarding due diligence before virtualizating anything – “Don’t virtualize rubbish – otherwise you have virtual rubbish.”
• We often forget that virtualization is more than just servers and storage – there are apps, desktops, etc
• Client virtualization / VDI is still top of a number of minds, though many are still at the investigative stage.  There are still lingering questions about user adoption, bandwidth / network constraints, and ROI.  (Though I am a big believer.)
• When we build staffs, we should strive for them to be “T-shaped” – technically deep in few areas, but linkages to the broader business.
• It’s important to run IT as a business – remember that it is providing something of value that its customer is willing to pay for
• Some good discussion on IT chargeback and allocation, which many are not doing today, but forsee implementing in the future.  Four required characteristics of IT chargeback: simplicity, fairness, predictability, and control.

Also got a walkthrough of the IBM containerized data center, as well as SGI’s container – both very cool.  (No pun intended.)  I’ve now had the pleasure to see the modular / container data centers from  HP, Dell, IBM, and SGI first hand.

Some interesting stats and statistical predictions from Gartner:

• 2/3 of the live audience was polled said they will be pursuing a private cloud strategy by 2014
• What’s the top concern regarding cloud computing?  Security and privacy are still at the top.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world.  Twitter – the 7th. (Wow.)
• There has been more video uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS had been airing content 24/7/365 continuously since 1948.  (WOW.)
• Data centers can consume 40x – 100x  more energy than the offices they support.
• An 8,000 square foot datacenter could cost $1.6M per year for just power.
• Data centers will be significantly smaller in the next 5 – 10 years
• Data expected to grow 800% over the next 5 years, and 80% of it will likely be unstructured.
• Today’s labor force will have 10 – 14 jobs by age 38

As you can tell, just a lot of good discussion on cloud, data centers, power, and overall IT.

OK, don’t want to overload more than I have – will back tomorrow night.

(UPDATE: Click here for Part 2.)

Until next time.

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge