The Changing Face of Data Centers
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, May 19, 2008

Data centers have evolved to a surprising extent over the last decade or so. But with virtualization, SaaS and on-demand software moving towards becoming the order of the day in enterprise software, the next few years could bring revolutionary changes in the data center

Data centers are key to application delivery and will be increasingly so in years to come. As desktop virtualization takes root, data center will be the central hub containing all the processing power, with very little or no processing at the user's desk. The user will get all the functionality sans the headache of having to deal with the hardware. System and network administrators will have better control over centralized resources and will be able to provision and deprovision resources in a more organized fashion without disrupting operations.

Networks, obviously, will assume even more importance given that they will be the primary application carriers of the future. Network availability, security, and scalibility will be an important factor in business success in a world dominated by Web 2.0 and SaaS.

While the impact of virtualization on the data center is expected to be clear and profound, what dynamics SaaS would bring to the data center is still a guess. However, it can only lead to data centers becoming less complex than they are today,as some applications move away from in-house data centers to those of service providers. Currently, data centers across industries such as banking, financial services and other service entities remain huge server farms with loads of cooling requirements and utilization rates as low as 30 %. This scenario has to change and hopefully large scale adoption of virtualization will change all that.

With all that riding on data centers as well as networks, one important factor to consider for enterprises would be risk management. Disaster recovery and business continuity will have to be taken into account in IT strategies by organizations. Indian enterprises may not have the scale to provision for expensive DR and BCM solutions, but these could be key in threat situations where entire networks or outsourced data centers are jeopardized. Moreover, as virtulization brings in huge cost-savings, some of these resources could be utlized to plan and provision for disaster situations.

While talking of outsourced data centers, they may have many benefits such as cost and space savings, but their future is uncertain as virtualization could provide these benefits without outsourcing. This allows you to have better control over your resources than in the case of an outsourced data center.