2011 Prediction: Viridity Software

We should give credit where credit is due.  Over the past few years, when it comes to saving energy, technology vendors have delivered. They offered better, more efficient server, storage and networking products that required much less power than they did just a few years prior.  Not only that, equipment got cheaper.   Virtualization capabilities played a key role here of course, helping to bring the net price of adding an application to just a fraction of what it was previously.  In 2010, opportunities were plentiful for thrifty, energy-conscious organizations.

However, while virtualization certainly solved one set of data center challenges, it oftentimes created another – increased power usage in concentrated areas of the data center that caused operational expenses to escalate and significantly hindered the ability to expand IT capacity to meet business demands.

In 2011, data center managers will recognize that this need not be a seemingly inevitable consequence of virtualization.  They will be keenly focused on solutions that help them to eliminate this problem.  Savvy data center managers will seek accurate, easy to manage and economical solutions for fully optimizing IT capital investments, without negative impact to operational expenses or capabilities.  Specifically, the following capabilities will become standard check-off boxes when investing in new technology (hardware or software) for an existing, new or soon to be expanded data centers:

Data Center Asset Inventory

Must provide the data center manager with an automatic and accurate solution for completing a detailed data center asset inventory (i.e., device, address, description, operating system, processors, disk drives, memory, etc.).  The need to manage huge, cumbersome spreadsheets must be eliminated.

Energy Measurement

Must deliver completely accurate measurement of energy consumption (unlike current methodologies such as faceplate or fixed de-rating technologies) – taking into account both peak and slow processing periods.  This capability will be critical for eliminating wasteful margin when provisioning energy, as well as for discovering unknown hidden IT asset capacity.

Utilization Modeling

Utilization and business criticality must be captured for each specific IT device.  The corresponding energy consumption must then be profiled at a dramatically more granular level than current technologies.  This capability will allow data center managers to quickly and easily identify opportunities for consolidation, as well as optimally plan for placement of new equipment.

Capacity Planning

Complete capacity planning must account for real and virtual environments.  Care must be taken not export real world power, space and cooling problems into a virtual environment.

In 2011, the ability to measure energy consumption (i.e., power and cooling) down to the device level, in both physical and/or virtualized environments will be key.  However, customary measurement reports will no longer be sufficient.  Data center managers will demand the ability to fully map and understand the correlation between physical infrastructure, IT equipment and applications.  And then, to take it even a step further – data center managers will rightly demand analysis and actionable-strategies that they can leverage and deploy in order to run more efficient, less expensive, highly optimized, eco-friendly/green, and sustainable data centers.