Gartner’s Top 10 for 2008 – Outlook Virtual and Green

With only a few months remaining in 2007, industry analyst firm Gartner is already looking toward next year to see what technology and trends will be important and strategic for most organizations.

In its new report, the analyst has identified its top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 and is urging IT executives to take a closer look. One reason, Gartner said that if businesses don’t improve the datacenter energy efficiency, the government may step in and force them to do so.

The report lists the following as the top 10:

• Green IT

• Unified Communication

• Business Process Modeling

• Metadata Management

• Virtualization 2.0

• Mashup and Composite Apps

• Web Platform and WOA

• Computing Fabric

• Real World Web

• and Social Software

Gartner has created a great list for 2008, so what are other industry experts thinking? Specifically for Virtualization Report readers, what are other people saying when you think about Green IT, Virtualization 2.0 and Web Platform & WOA.

Gartner said the focus of Green IT will continue to accelerate and expand in 2008. They said regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny.

Rackspace recently surveyed nearly 400 of their business customers and found the following responses that back up Gartner’s analysis of Green IT:

• Thirty-eight percent of respondents think potential carbon taxes or environmental regulation will somewhat impact their business.

• Thirty-six percent think potential carbon taxes or environmental regulation will have no impact on their business.

• Nine percent of respondents have chosen to go green because of regulatory reasons today or in the future.

• Fifty-two percent would pay 5-10% more to work with a green vendor rather than other market offerings.

• Fifty-one percent are willing to sacrifice 5-10% of server performance for lower carbon emissions.

• Seventy-five percent would choose a green vendor over a non-green vendor if the prices were the same.

Rackspace CTO John Engates told me that based on feedback from his customers, “we agree companies will begin emphasizing social responsibility as it becomes more of a deciding factor in the vendor selection process. Regulation is inevitable, but we may not see this for a couple of years. With 2008 being an election year, I think 2009 is the year we’ll actually see more traction with data center/corporate IT regulation.”

He added, “I also believe that over the next several years, R&D in datacenter design best practices will continue to advance at a rapid rate, and companies that build equipment for the datacenter will make great progress in efficient new designs for their systems.”

When I asked Serguei Beloussov, CEO at SWsoft, if their customers considered the idea of Green IT as something important to them or if it was thought of as marketing hype, he said that SWsoft is definitely seeing a growing interest, not hype, in green computing. Beloussov said, “The reason why Green IT is taking off in our customer base is the matching of clear economic benefits to environmental benefits with regard to virtualization-enabled machine consolidation. By deploying technologies that can lead to a greener data center, businesses can reduce electricity cost and better use expensive physical space where servers are located. Further, they can provide a reduction in management cost and operating system sprawl (in the case of container-based virtualization) and overall better agility from the IT staff.”

Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, told me that it was hard to see this evolving in a way that doesn’t closely trend to cost savings. Hillier said, “Pound for pound (of carbon) datacenters are still fantastic vehicles for overall economic productivity growth, and for regulators to hold them to a higher standard than other forms of industry would seem odd. Self regulation, on the other hand, is very useful if it provides market differentiation (e.g. carbon neutral IT services) and/or closely parallels cost savings (as in server consolidation). Any time saving money also makes you green then you should jump on it, and I expect many people will in 2008.”

Gartner also talks about Virtualization 2.0 saying that virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency.

Engates said, “the management and automation piece to virtualization is absolutely critical to get the most of the technology as far as flexibility, resiliency, disaster recovery and more. However, the management and automation tools around virtualization have yet to enter the market specifically for large service providers. Today, these tools don’t meet the needs of large-scale data center operators like Rackspace who are operating more than 30,000 servers in multiple data centers across the globe.” Instead, Rackspace is forced to fill the gap themselves by creating their own tools to provide the company with the management and automation that they require.

Beloussov agrees that management and automation are critical to make Virtualization 2.0 successful. In that list, he also adds the need for performance and says, “Next-generation virtualization must enable any workload to be virtualized without performance or availability loss, no matter how demanding it is.”

When talking about Gartners top 10 list, Hillier made an interesting observation when he said that virtualization has become the unwitting enabler for many of the top 10 items listed by Gartner. And he added that many of the top 10 issues didn’t even exist when virtualization was first conceived, yet its advantages in efficiency and flexibility make it an obvious choice to deal with many of them.

When asked about virtualization specifically, Hillier noted that “Firstly, virtualizing the ‘low hanging fruit’ is completely different than tackling the complex mission critical systems that reside deep in the data center. This will cause organizations to place more rigor on the planning and execution of these initiatives, and to integrate this more seamlessly into the long-term management of the environment. In addition, virtualization is only truly transformational if the paradigm is embraced fully, and quick-and-dirty implementations will leave you with a ‘virtual physical’ environment, that looks and smells like a physical environment but takes up less rack space. This may be expeditious, and indeed is warranted in certain situations, but it completely undersells the potential of the technology.”

SWsoft and Rackspace both agree with Gartner’s assessment that Web Platform and WOA should be watched in 2008. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies should be evaluating where SaaS can provide value in 2008-2010.

Beloussov said that WOA and SaaS have already made a tremendous impact in today’s enterprise, but that he agrees that much more lies ahead. “The next step is to develop common standards that developers, ISVs, service providers and internal IT departments can leverage to deliver WOA and SaaS-based applications more efficiently and to broader sets of users.”

While SaaS may be perfect for many applications, Engates said that SaaS will only take you so far. Applications that are highly customized will migrate to web platforms rather than following the SaaS route.

He predicts that the hosting provider will absorb the infrastructure complexities for them such as hardware resources, scaling, security, etc. while the customer simply plugs into the ‘cloud’ and focuses on the application. Engates said, “Rackspace is delivering many of its core offerings ‘as a service’ like storage, backup, bandwidth and most recently mail. Our customers already take advantage of ‘infrastructure as a service’ at Rackspace and increasingly more of our offerings will be delivered using this model.”

What do you think about Garner’s Top 10 List for 2008? How does it fit within your organization’s goals or outlooks?