Data Center Technology Roadmap

Literature Review

The literature review spanned a wide variety of documents - white papers from the industry partners including the Government to determine what are the market drivers, what are the categories of data centers, technologies that have a bearing on these categories, the technology components, the trends that the infrastructure as well as the underlying applications are going through, the challenges that the data centers are facing and can face in the future, the frameworks that affect the infrastructure and the expectations of the business users who ultimately are the decision makers.

Based on this research, the forthcoming sections would report on the items above that the reader of the roadmap can utilize to navigate and make an informed progress in the decision making process.

A recent survey conducted by the Symantec Corporation for the State of the Data Center Regional Data confirmed the observation that the data center managers reported both an increase in what they needed to accomplish as well as a strong drive to reduce costs. It had become imperative that there needed to be quite a few initiatives at the data center targeted at increasing the IT efficiency.

The survey centered on data center staff in 1600 companies worldwide that ranged in size from 5,000 to more than 50,000 employees, with the median company having between 10,000 and 19,999 employees. The median company in those 1600 reported having 500 people working in IT, 30 to 49 data centers, and about 20 percent of their IT staff dedicated to data center responsibilities.

According to Charles King from the Pund-IT Research[25], an IT industry analysis firm, the following are the issues to be considered behind the cost issues that need to be looked at while determining the need or the continuance of a data center: