BLADE SERVER TECHNOLOGY - HOT TOPIC -
IT Trends In an Economic Downturn

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Brace Rennels Technical Marketing Manager Double-Take Software Brace is a CBCP at Double-Take Software and has been involved with over 1600 accounts managing, architecting and design BCP controls for IT infrastructure. Utilizing his Business Continuity skills, Brace is responsible for managing resources, coordinating with multiple vendors and partners to provide the best business continuity solution for many fortune 500 companies. Brace has lead several BC/DR webinars as well as now heading up a BCP social media campaign to share his experience with other BCP professionals in online forums.

Overview

Over the course of the next year with the economic downturn you will see many companies looking for ways to trim costs and cut expenses. The easiest way to accomplish this is to freeze hiring, expenditures and begin cutting workforce as you have seen many companies in the financial industry already do. However, there will be other ways that companies will be cutting costs but it will be in the way of adopting new technologies for the data center to help operate more efficiently.

Server Consolidation

Consolidating servers will be one of these methods. Although the real estate market has dropped significantly data center space can still be an expensive commodity. By consolidating larger rack mounted servers to faster more efficient blade servers, companies will be able to reduce the overall footprint of their data center. On top of that it is likely that those blade servers will then be combined with virtualization technology to help further reduce that foot print. Doing this will not only minimize the space used for the previous servers it will also dramatically help reduce power and cooling costs of operating those same servers. Energy prices aren't like to go down any further than they have been in the last five years and if anything the forecasts suggest that costs for power, heating and cooling will be going back up in the near future.

Virtualization

Virtualization has been a hot trend for the last few years and companies who have started investing in this technology certainly aren't going to cut back those budgets now. Virtualizing older less performing servers will only contribute to the cost savings bottom line. It doesn't matter the virtualization technology used, VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or Virtual Iron, there will still be a pretty good adoption rate.

More and more companies are virtualizing on blade servers. Virtualization not only helps consolidate the data center space but it will also provide an ease of management. Virtual Desktop Integration (VDI) is also something that companies are looking to implement. Not only can the servers be virtualized for consolidation and improved performance, but also you can have your call centers and desktop users boot from a single virtual image, which can prevent corruption and improve the ability to rapidly provision new machines.

iSCSI Storage

Data centers that have typically housed very large SAN or NAS devices are looking to expand their storage but make it more accessible via the internet "cloud". Traditional SAN with fiber controller HBA's are significantly more expensive and were limited to the number of HBA's could be connected. This also limited the storage from being stretched over distance for a disaster recovery solution or just providing centralized storage for remote offices.

With iSCSI technology not only is the storage cheaper than previous SAN or NAS devices they are also more flexible to be accessed via the web and via the a standard Ethernet port rather than requiring the expensive fiber channel HBA. There are iSCSI software solutions that also help provide bootable images for the purpose of provisioning, desktop integration and or disaster recovery solutions that are much faster than attempting to restore from tape.

Overall, these three technology trends will continue to increase over the next few years and help companies reduce costs. IT and data center managers will be kept busy provisioning and migrating systems to a virtual infrastructure and companies will continue to fund such projects in order to reduce their costs and utility consumption. The sooner these technologies are adopted by companies the sooner they will be able to recognize the cost savings so the trend will continue even through an economic downturn.