Vernon Turner is the Senior Vice President of IDC's Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and Sustainability Research. He predicts that in the next three years, virtualization and convergences will have a profound impact on we run our IT infrastructure, our data center environments, and the way our businesses evolve.
To start with, every element within the data center and the network infrastructure, in support of the business environment, must keep up with the services demanded by the business units. By 2015, the number of virtual machines will outpace the number of physical servers, while the growth rate for server cores will continue to exceed 30% annually, accompanied by a six-fold increase in the amount of data, which will impose critical requirements on computing capacity and disk storage. The network infrastructure must be optimized for the data center, while network switch configuration within the data center must virtualize in a cost-effective manner. The network should be connected to every node and provide the necessary backup and recovery capabilities.
IT departments are currently overwhelmed by such complicated requirements and are being forced to outsource. CIOs are looking at technology, such as a well implemented virtualization strategy balanced with converged infrastructure architecture, as a way to reduce that complexity and optimize all IT assets. Lastly, IDC believes that the core elements of data center infrastructure should be future-proof in terms of capacity and ease of management, even as the number of virtual machines and servers expand thanks to core switch virtualization.
