Data Center World Undertone: Where the IT spending is and is not

Business News

Tuesday, 10 March 2009 13:47

Written by Staff Writer

Today launches the official start of AFCOMs Data Center World sessions in Las Vegas, Nevada that will run until Wednesday this week. In his keynote, Greg Papadopoulus, Chief Technology officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Sun Microsystems, has provided the Data Center World audience a reminder of the rapidly changing IT environment and reviewed solutions and choices from hardware to software that are currently available. However, the undertone is clearly the impact of the economy on IT and data center spending.

In his message, Papadopoulus provides us with an image of what can be confusing options. Today’s IT department struggles to standardize as individual departments and client demands tug in different directions.

According to Papadopoulus, the focus should be on items that are easily implementable. In a difficult economy companies are looking for a rapid return on investment and project such as virtualization, open source software and now cloud computing are being implemented or examined as solutions for today’s data center environment.

Mr. Papadopoulus provided the audience with ways to implement these technologies using his own company as an example. According to Papadopoulus, “Bringing these latest technologies into your data center will allow end users and developers to get what they need, when they need it, and at the same time (re)empower IT with ownership of the data center infrastructure.”

Papadopoulus also praised the growth of cloud computing and noted, "Cloud computing will mature and develop faster than we think because of the current economic conditions acting as an accelerant.” He also notes that the adoption of cloud computing will continue because it has become popular with app developers.

It appears that many organizations are taking this precise path and are developing a new data center and IT ops diet. Spending will only take place if it is needed or if the return on investment provides immediate and long running payback like virtualization.

The IT department spending habits during these economic times was recently revealed in a study of 450 IT professionals in the LinkedIn network that was conducted in December 2008 by Millward Brown, Research International, and Lightspeed Research who collaborated with LinkedIn.

In looking at 26 technology categories storage showed the greatest growth in 2009.

Steve Ingledew, Managing Director of Millward Brown's Technology Practice observed, "In times of recession, there is a heightened need to protect what you have and in many ways, storage is to technology what insurance is to financial services; with data increasing exponentially and with the appetite for risk low, this is an area in which you simply don't want to compromise."

The study revealed that achieving cost efficiencies is the top priority in most IT environments.

It is not surprising that virtualization was at the top of IT decision maker’s minds as the trend that will continue to impact IT for the next five years. Virtualization has the ability to reduce server use, therefore presenting a savings on equipment and energy.

Virtualization has the ability to meet cost savings without a huge investment.

Attention exhibitors, the economy has IT departments tightening their belts, but if your solution can provide a high return on investment and can help make the data center energy efficient then you may get some looks this week.

We will wait and see on how well exhibitors did as we will follow up with several of them to report back to you later this week on what they saw and their impressions of IT spending. Stay tuned. 

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