Bittman Talks about Data Center Sprawl

Okay, this post is a little late, but hey, it was hard to get work done after hours in Vegas. We had booth duty until 8:30pm at the show, followed by a long dinner. I'm not much of a gambler, but I did drop $40 in slot machines, hoping for the big payout. So I didn't break the bank, and I'm back to blogging.

Here are some highlights from Tom Bittman's opening keynote at the Gartner Conference:

Data center sprawl (physical and virtual) can be managed by creating pools of resources. Automation of the Real Time Infrastructure will be the trend if 2010-2016. Virtualization is becoming a commodity. By the end of 2008, the hypervisor will become free. By the end of 2009, there will be 4 million x86 VM’s. Managing those VM's will be the challenge, and where most vendors should focus their efforts.

Real Time Infrastructure

• Resources are shared.
• The interface is business policy and SLA’s.
• Provides agility to applications and services.
• Inputs are service requirements, servers and storage. The outputs are IT services.

CMDB’s must be used with well-defined process. Organizations must make changes to culture and process for CMDB’s to be effective.

Run Book Automation: workflow of operations and process. This is not really technology.

Virtualization enables alternative delivery models:

• Cloud computing / grid
• Software appliances
• Containers
• Infrastructure as a service

Power and cooling are problems. Demand drives an increase in energy requirements. Virtualization solves a short-term, tactical problem. However, virtualization increases the long-term demand for energy, since the barrier to entry for deploying new servers (as VM’s) is reduced.

Over the next few days, I'll try to post about the other sessions I attended. Stay tuned.