Key Issues for Servers, 2008

The article I have recently read was divided into three parts: 

Data Center Power, Cooling and Facilities

In the last 5 years the power demand of equipment have grown significantly, putting huge pressure on the capacity of data center. The heat/power problem will be very irritating for data center managers. In long term it is possible that 50% of today’s data centers will not have sufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demand. Managers are looking for ways to deliver a highly available, secure, flexible infrastructure constantly dealing with costs, technology, people and location issues.

Server Infrastructure

Server vendors are attempting to differentiate their products and position themselves in many new ways:

• some are embracing industry-standard hardware and operating systems (OSs)
• others continue to innovate outside the mass market
• some are trying to do both

Virtualization technologies start to play a very important role in servers infrastructure. They make distributed resources easier to manage, reprovison and use efficiently. In the future virtualization will be very important for most enterprises.

Server Consolidation, Migration and Upgrades

The success of incumbent technologies will be determined by several factors:

• vendors' capability to deliver promised cost and operational benefits
• ease of integrating new technologies with important legacy systems
• the marketing, sales and support expertise of the vendors that supply the technology