Gartner Releases Data on Hot Enterprise Topics

Gartner's 27th annual datacenter conference is producing research related to energy consumption, virtualization, cloud computing. Here are some of the most interesting numbers revealed at the conference.

Forty-two percent of IT professionals polled at the Gartner conference operate three or more datacenters in North America.

Forty-five percent are expanding or planning to expand datacenters in the next two years, while 43 percent are consolidating.

A standard 9,000 square foot, Tier 3 datacenter that supports 150 watts per square foot will cost approximately US$21.3 million (about Rs 105 crore) to build, with $1 million (about Rs 5 crore) in annual electrical costs.

Green IT practices that minimize use of chiller plants, fans and pumps, lighting and power supplies can more than halve the power costs of running a datacenter.

An aggressively "green" enterprise will pay $560,000 (about Rs 2.8 crore) in annual electrical expenses for a datacenter with a 500 kilowatt IT load. Enterprises with archaic datacenter practices will pay as much as $1.3 million (about Rs 650 lakh).

In a conventional datacenter, 35 percent to 50 percent of electrical energy is devoted to cooling. With best practices, that proportion is reduced to 15 percent.

Twenty-six percent of conference attendees buy green products only when they lower costs, save space or defer datacenter construction.

Thirty-four percent will buy green products even if they increase costs.

Storage spending is growing almost three times faster than the IT budget as a whole. From 2007 to 2011, storage spending will increase more than 7 percent a year, compared with annual IT budget growth of only 2.5 percent.
By 2012, users will install 6.5 times the amount of terabytes they installed in 2008.

Server virtualization, one of the key technologies driving costs down in datacenters, is suitable for about 70 percent of workloads.

Today, only 12 percent of x86 server workloads are running in virtual machines.
By 2013, that number will be 61 percent.

One out of every four x86 workloads deployed or redeployed in 2008 is being installed in a virtual machine. Still, vendor licensing, pricing and support plans are limiting virtualization efforts, according to 21 percent of conference attendees.

About 70 percent of virtual machines today are used in production. Just a few years ago, most were used only in test and development roles.

The server virtualization market will grow 30 percent a year through 2013, reaching $6.8 billion (about Rs 34,000 crore).

Desktop virtualization will also take off, with the number of virtualized PCs growing from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011.

Only two major server operating systems will experience significant growth through 2010 -- Windows and Linux. But lightweight operating systems will take off with double-digit growth, including JeOS, a variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances.

Thirty-eight percent of conference attendees are using some type of external cloud computing service.
By 2012 at least 14 percent of the infrastructure at Fortune 1000 companies will be service-oriented, scalable and elastic -- operated as if it they were "private clouds" for each company's users.

Source : Network World

Jon Brodkin

CIO India - Gartner Releases Data on Hot Enterprise Topics