Business agilityandvirtualisationwill become the primary
measures of datacentre excellence by 2012, says analyst
Gartner.
Virtualisation greatly reduces the number of servers, space,
power and cooling demands and ultimately enables agility, said
Gartner.
"An agile datacentre will handle exceptions effectively, and
learn from exceptions to improve standards and processes," said Tom
Bittman, an analyst at Gartner.
"Agility will become a major business differentiator in a
connected world. Business agility requires agility in the
datacentre, which is difficult as many of the technologies for
improving the intelligence and self-management of IT are very
immature, but they will evolve over the next ten years," said
Bittman.
Within the datacentre, agility should be measured in terms that
make sense to the business, such as the time and cost to deploy new
servers, to install new software or to fix a problem, said
Gartner.
While the vast majority of large organisations have started to
virtualise their servers, Gartner estimates that currently only 6%
of the addressable market is penetrated by virtualisation, a figure
set to rise to 11% by 2009.
But the number of virtualised machines deployed on servers is
expected to grow from 1.2 million to 4 million in 2009, Gartner
said.