FOCUS ANALYSIS
Issue 14, February/March
growth in demand for skills, even outside the emerging regions.
“We are seeing demand grow for a number of new skills,” Worn says. “The industry is crying out for people with cloud computing skills, unified computing and platform infrastructure skills, converged network infrastructure and virtualization skills.”
“You have to remember virtualization is not that old. Guys with virtualization experience are some of the most in-demand folks in the industry. This is because getting it right can be so difficult and the benefits are tremendous.
“Getting back to reality, have you seen a cloud engineering course appear yet at the University of Leeds? This is just one example of the issue the industry is facing. Training has not kept up with new technology skills because the technology is moving at a pace much faster than education or training can even deliver.”
THE TECHNOLOGY TSUNAMI
Welcome to the zettabyte era. (For those needing explanation, a zettabyte is equal to 1,000 exabytes).
Once the dream of technologists more than willing to enter brave new worlds, the rise of exponential amounts of data and demand is now pushing data center and IT operators and vendors, in some ways reluctantly, towards the promise of unified computing. As Worn says, technologists are in many ways holding their breath for the promise of the zettabye era to ring true. He warns, however, that they could end up gasping for air.
“The data tsunami is still happening,” Worn says. “We know data center and IT spending will grow and that in many ways storage continues to be key into 2011 – not just the application layer but the storage, hardware and software components as well. This can be seen at the chip level, for example, where Intel has started putting storage and power aware features on the chip.
“CEOs and CFOs will continue to look at the Cloud as an on-demand resource from computing to storage and to reduce data center and IT expenditure. All big enterprises, from those that design and operate their data centers to those using someone else’s, are all looking at flattening out their cost curves.”
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This is where one of the biggest buzzwords for 2011 comes into play. Demand, from space on demand to design by demand, will be a well- used word this year in the data center industry.
“The world we are looking at is all about on- demand. This will change how many people make strategic decisions about spending and planning capacity, the importance of cloud computing and so on. One operator might say we don’t need a new data center, instead we can use containers for expansion while another will look to move to the cloud. The ability to get capacity without the time and money constraints seen in the past has brought about major improvements and major change in the data center space. This will certainly continue to affect the industry this year,” Worn says.
M AND A OR M&A?
So who does Worn think you will be doing business with year? To be honest, he thinks in many areas of the data center market it could be difficult to tell.
“As IT spending improves there is demand for new technologies, which will increase mergers and acquisitions. Companies will pull together their unified solutions and portfolios, as we have already seen with HP and Dell’s battle over 3PAR, and we are also likely to see new groups formed with companies strategically
“Of all the industries we in the data center industry are the best educated, best prepared and best able to deal with the challenges of energy efficiency. We are engineers and technologists, so we love a challenge. This is why this year we will see lots of operators use their skills and expertise to drive solutions outside of the box.”
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“Every UK data center operator has been shaken to their foundations since 2008 because of the impacts from the economy, carbon legislation turned tax, as well as the introduction of innovative and disruptive technologies and platoforms like cloud computing and virtualization,” Worn says. “The impacts from these are still being felt.”
“This has meant that our roles as data center and IT operators have changed. We are learning more every day about financial control, resource optimization and the demands of the board room more than we know about the latest electrical code standards.”
Worn also says the data center industry has taken to heard its responsibilities in the broader scheme of things.
This is where business intelligence and metrics are playing a massive part. Tools for the data center and IT infrastructure are really starting to take its place on the shelf and it seems, with growing demand for monitoring and measuring tools, business intelligence solutions and DCIM will become some of the best sellers.
“Once you had 10 different screens for different functions in the DOC but new advancements in software and integration tools are bringing data center infrastructure management into its own stride, making implementation better, driving the
advancement of business intelligence
and in turn increasing data levels. Add cloud computing and virtualization capabilities to this and it is easy to see what is happening,” Worn says.
This is why this year we will see lots of operators use their skills and
expertise to drive solutions outside of the box
partnering to create unified platforms, like was seen with the formation of VMware, EMC and Cisco,” Worn says. “This means that the industry’s technological drive and innovation will improve even more as companies begin to pull resources into holistic unified solutions with plug and play capabilities.”
Worn predicts the storage space will continue to be ripe for M&A activity in the year ahead and when it comes to the data center players themselves, get ready to see M&A with cost savings in mind. “Demand is driving uptake,” Worn says. “But at some point in time we will see M&A not only for competitive advantage but for geographic expansion.”
Then there will be those who decide to get rid of the data center altogether, driving growth in outsourcing services, while others will simply push foward with consolidation plans. Either way, Worn says the idea will be to drive out complexity in the data center, in the boardroom and on the balance sheet.
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