The sustainable datacentre market will see accelerated growth in 2013 as it becomes more focused on cost-savings, and provides more efficient internal IT delivery methods such as virtualisation, software-defined networks (SDNs) and the use of converged infrastructure solutions, according to analyst firm, Ovum.
In its 2013 Trends to Watch: Datacentre Technology report, Ovum said that organisations are, logically, looking at getting the best value from investments, and will therefore be looking at cost-savings and improved sustainability.
“Due to the rise of datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) market… the role of chief sustainability office (CSO) will become more commonplace in organisations,” Ovum principal analyst, Roy Illsley, said.
DCIM will become more widely used in 2013, as its initial drives will be based on costs linked to energy and change.
Development and operations (DevOps) will also form a part of sustainable IT in 2013. According to Ovum, the movement needs organisations to adopt strong governance capabilities that mandate the adoption of agile processes for business benefit to ensure that best practices are followed across the development lifecycle.
Other key trends in 2013 will be the complete virtualisation of all layers in the datacentre from the database, to the storage, out to the user, which will also drive the need for greater automation technologies and the associated orchestration layer.
For enterprise, the trend will focus more on sustainable IT and in particular, DCIM and DevOps.
The bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) movement will become more of a reality between 2013 and 2014, and the mobile policies for corporate use and the growth of smartphones will be combined to provide a path for increased adoption by employees.
For vendors, 2013 looks set to see wider adoption of automation technologies because CIOs will have to deliver the same or more services at reduced cost.
The hype surrounding Cloud computing can lead some organisations to predict the end of the internal datacentre, but Ovum states that it is too early to make such bold statements. The firm said that for many organisations, the question of workload classification remains a difficult issue, and the default position is to keep it on-premise. Even if the workloads are fully understood in terms of risk, cost, and value, the ability to move them is the ‘Achilles heel’ of current technologies.
“This scenario is highly unlikely to change unless workloads between Cloud technologies become truly portable in 2013 or security and privacy concerns evaporate,” Illsey said.
