In 2009, multitudes of IT departments had to reassess their datacenters, and many are making enlightening discoveries, like air cooling can be sufficient in keeping systems in optimum condition or 15-30 percent of what is consuming power in their datacenters can be turned off with no harmful effect. So what does this type of complete and thorough datacenter inventorying translate to for the IT industry in 2010? ServerWatch's Andy Patrizio offers his opinion.

Upgrading Servers for Energy Efficiency, Consolidation

Patrizio sees customers getting rid of older, single-core, 32-bit servers in favor of virtualized, multi-core systems. He cites Intel as reporting that more than 40 percent of the servers currently in datacenters use single-core chips that are four or more years old -- and are therefore ready to be replaced.

Intel did just that across its own infrastructure, replacing old single-core machines with multi-core Nehalem-powered servers. In one year, Intel reports it cut its datacenters from 147 to 70, consolidated old servers to Nehalem-based by a factor of 10 to one, and in the end, saved $250 million over the course of eight years. For 2009, thanks to reduced power, cooling and maintenance costs, Intel said it saved $19 million.

Storage

Deduplication will continue its momentum, according to Patrizio, as customers become less willing to simply deploy more capacity as the answer to storage woes. He predicts there will be greater attention paid to what is being stored and saved.

Green Technology

Because of the savings reaped from more eco-efficient technologies, customers will continue to move toward the green ones. "If SSD drives use 20 fewer watts than a traditional hard disk, multiply that by several thousand and you are talking real savings," Patrizio writes.

Denser Systems

Larger-sized datacenters and supercomputers will continue to grow. With supercomputers drawing power in the megawatt range and new high-speed interconnects like 40Gb Ethernet, Patrizio sees scale-out systems growing even larger.

GPU-powered Systems

The Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers will show an increasing number of GPU-powered systems, and the performance bar will increase fast with the massive math co-processors.

Containers

Containers are expected to increase in popularity since they make it easier to build a self-contained environment, control the environmental variables, and move things around.

Slow-growing Clouds

An expected slow growth rate is anticipated with the cloud. Patrizio sees cloud computing working for some usage models (like mail servers) but not all. He predicts customers will take a slow approach to determine what the cloud can do for them and where it should go.

More Information

2009 Datacenter Recap, What to Expect in 2010 - ServerWatch article [...read more...]

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