Data Center Strategies Coverage Areas

Umbrella Technology Focus:

New and future data center technologies for server and storage virtualization, compute densities, server and storage management improvements, and data center physical and logical architectures.

Burton Group Data Center Strategies (DCS) service gives you actionable guidance on building and operating your data centers more efficiently while preparing them for the future.

Primary Areas of Focus for 2008

• Virtualization: Server and storage virtualization have evolved from earlier consolidation projects involving non-business critical servers and storage to enterprise production systems. Advancements in virtualization technologies have made them enticing for business critical services by enabling high availability, disaster recovery, and added flexibility to IT systems and processes. But determining the best solution among those available, for the long term, as well as how to organize and deploy virtualization technologies to achieve maximum efficiency, can be daunting. Burton group’s in-depth approach to server and storage virtualization technologies and methodologies enables IT administrators to get below the surface and understand how best to architect and deploy these technologies to cost effectively solve business problems.

• Storage: Digital storage is in the midst of "the perfect storm": explosive growth, regulatory retention requirements, and the need for increased availability and protection across all data types in the enterprise. This, coupled with the need to support virtual machine infrastructures and the new class of tiered SOA applications, has created the need for it organizations to architect and build storage infrastructures and storage management systems that can stand the test of time. Burton group’s coverage of storage technologies and trends in the areas of SANs, NAS, iSCSI, archiving, disk-to-disk backup, and other emerging storage technologies helps organizations architect storage infrastructure systems and policies to meet demands today and into the future.

• Compute: The ever increasing needs for more compute power in order to remain competitive in the market place have placed a strain on data center facilities—especially power and cooling capacity. IT organizations demand more compute per watt of energy used and rising costs of both utilities and real estate have put a squeeze on it budgets. Newer server hardware sporting multiple CPU cores, blade servers for increased density and efficiency, I/O bus enhancements, improvements in operating systems including 64-bit computing, performance improvements, and power management improvements put pressure on organizations to get the greatest amount of compute out of the money they spend. Burton group provides guidance on strategies in compute density, server hardware, operating systems, and power and cooling to enable organizations to improve efficiency at minimal cost and extract the most amount of value per watt of energy consumed. Future proofing data center architectures to harness technical advances in hardware, operating systems and facilities infrastructure is addressed.

• Operations and Management A data center is more than the sum of its parts. Data center management requires a highly skilled IT staff armed with the appropriate orchestration tools to stem the tide of explosive data growth, migrate to virtualized platforms or manage rising energy costs. In addition, operational modes – such as disaster recovery – demand planning and practice to ensure business continuity. Business pressures that organizations face today require a flexible IT infrastructure that can transform the data center from an IT expenditure into a competitive advantage. Burton Group provides in-depth coverage on systems management, autonomic computing, managed services, co-location and disaster recovery operational modes, and facilities management necessary for IT administrators plan IT operations and manage the data center.

Additional Areas of Focus for 2008

• Industry Standard Server Hardware including Blade Servers
• Emerging disk technologies
• Storage Arrays, JBODs, NAS appliances
• Data Center Management Standards
• CPU technology
• Data Center Physical Security
• Client Virtualization
Published Content List