TheInfoPro

19 August 2009 – In our work on with clients in the G2000 we see first hand how the IT Infrastructure is evolving and how companies are trying to lay out a plan for implementing the moniker being dubbed “internal or private cloud” platforms. It seems like a long road before large enterprises will ever consider moving to external cloud providers however there is merit to what the external providers can/will provide from a disaster recovery, replication and potential federated approach for extra capacity on demand.

One large Financial Services client we recently met with laid out a three phased approach with us that is consistent with what we hear when working with many others in the G2000:

Phase I: Server Virtualization  – this is definitely the cornerstone of the move for many organizations.  “Racks & Rows” as this Financial Services firm calls it.  The first move to Virtualization has been with non mission critical (development & test) Servers.  There will be more in future posts discussing the gating factors in moving more of the entire Server farms, specifically production applications to Virtualization many of it revolves around management tool sets, security and meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs).  In TheInfoPro’s latest Servers research 50% of the companies interviewed cited 3-5 years as being the timeframe to move from standalone Servers to a Virtualized Platform.

Phase II: Aggregation of Blades through Faster Connectivity  – this is where Blade Servers  meet 10Gb – to make the Networking & Blades / hosting devices (TIP research shows Blade Servers to the dominant form factor ) come together and work at performance levels needed for the mission critical applications to support the SLAs needed for the  business units. 10GB adoption continues to be key functionality that Networking teams have as a high priority, with the Backbone being the first place to be adopted.  10GB Server connectivity is in use by 20% of our sample, with 59% still not having the roll out in plan yet.

Phase III: Storage on the back end that allows Phase I and II to come together – Tiered storage that can intelligently integrate everything from high performance Solid State Disk to low cost commodity SAS & SATA drives is the desire here.  The intelligence needed to support the needs of the compute platforms  is what companies will be looking. We are still at a low adoption rate of SSD in the Global 2000 (less than 10% have SSD in use today on a small scale), however companies that have the technology in long term plan (12-18 months out) has increased to 28% in our latest study released in the Spring of 2009 up from 15% in the Fall of 2008 Study.

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