2012 Prediction: Hitachi Data Systems

2012: The Year to Optimize Your IT Assets

As 2011 comes to a close and we look forward to what’s in store for 2012, companies are taking a good look at their IT infrastructure and are investing in systems and services that optimize their current IT assets, especially in view of supply constraints from the recent floods in Thailand. By taking to time to ensure that they are making the most of their current infrastructure, enterprises are setting themselves up to successfully meet their data center requirements in 2012 and beyond.

Closing the Consumption Gap

One trend that is becoming very clear to industry analysts, and others with a full view of the IT industry, is a growing gap between technology and the ability of IT organizations to consume the product features and realize the value that new technology can enable. Even after IT has purchased a new technology, they often do not have the cycles to realize its full value. This is leading IT to look to third party services to fill the gap and unload some of the grunt work so that their operations staffs can be properly trained to plan and execute closing the consumption gap between technology and operations.

One example of the consumption gap between IT technology and operations is with server virtualization. During the past few years, we have seen wide adoption of server virtualization, but there is a widening consumption gap. Many server virtualization users are still not able to enjoy the benefits of rapid advancements in server virtualization technology, because they have not had the time to either upgrade their hypervisor or upgrade their storage to support these new features.

Technology alone will not close this consumption gap. It takes time to learn the new technologies, plan the implementation and integration with existing systems, and execute the plan. If the proper planning is not done, it can create more work, which will result in cost overruns and business delay.

In 2012, expect to see companies looking to third party services to help with IT so their employees can take the time to become educated and do the proper planning to help close this consumption gap.

Reducing Energy Costs

Another big trend for 2012 is data centers making investments to reduce their energy costs through the use of energy efficient hardware such as Small Form Factor disks or technologies that increase the utilization of existing resources.

Over the past few years, the growth rate of energy consumption from data centers has been moderated significantly. This is due in large part to the adoption of server virtualization, which greatly reduced the power consumption of volume servers. In 2012, we will see a focus on reducing power consumption for storage on the scale that we have seen for servers.

Server virtualization does not do anything for storage; a server, whether it is physical or virtual, will require the same amount of storage. In fact, it might require more storage as applications tend to proliferate when servers are virtual and essentially free after the initial cost of the physical server. Fortunately, recent improvements in storage and data management, such as virtualization, can make storage sustainable.

Storage virtualization can reduce the need for storage capacity and related power and cooling, as well as automate the tiering of less active data to larger capacity disks, thin provision over-allocated volumes, and consolidate silos of external storage into a common pool of storage resources.

In 2012 we will see more focus on storage virtualization in order to reduce the power bill and carbon tax for data centers.