Data center agility is heating up!
Aug 27th, 2007 by Rick Barnard
Industry analysts predict that agility will be a critical success factor going forward for the majority of data centers. This is due to the growing importance of IT in business as the supply chain is more connected: vendors to customers, partners to each other.
The technologies that will enable data center agility are heating up and that is evident by recent acquisitions and public offerings.
- Virtualization is a key technology in servers, storage and networking that gives the IT organization much more control over how resources are allocated
- Virtual data center management through automation and service governance technologies enable the virtualized resources to automatically respond and the organization to react and change
Virtualization: Everyone is talking about the explosive public offering of VMware; however, Citrix;s acquisition of XenSource is another significant indicator of the importance that a virtual environment will have on business agility in the future. Virtualization is a key component that unlocks the business service from the physical infrastructure in the data center, but the management of those resources is another valuable element in creating a service-based and real-time infrastructure.
Virtual data center management: The industry is also rushing to capture value in areas that compliment server virtualization to enable an end-to-end virtualization platform and service-based capabilities. Ops ware was recently acquired by HP while BladeLogic announced their IPO in the data center automation arena. Other sectors such as Business Service Management (BSM) are also areas to watch with the acquisition of ProactiveNet by BMC and others by HP and CA.
Keep your eye on market developments – business agility is speeding up in real-time as the virtualization wave continues.