What was the most important data center development of 2009?
Without a doubt cloud computing has been the most important development of 2009. Despite this, the fact is that everyone is talking about it but no-one has really grasped what it means. Over 2009 cloud has made its way into the vocabulary of any conversation about data centre re-engineering, and has highlighted to customers that they don’t have to buy physical IT but instead can have IT delivered as a service. This is a huge conceptual shift in the way people will think about procuring IT in the future. We haven’t really started to feel the effects of cloud yet in practice, but just virtualisation has for many businesses now moved from an abstract concept to a reality that is having a measureable impact, so too will cloud make the same shift over the next few years.

What single advance would most positively impact the data center sector in 2010?
As power consumption in the data centre continues to come under increased scrutiny, the integration of virtualisation and power management technology has the potential to have a significant impact in 2010. Once servers, storage and the network are all virtualised you can start to automatically turn things off when they are not needed; then you start to feel the benefits of power saving. For example, you may need to run 100 servers during the day but only 10 at night. Automatically having the idle servers switch off to save power is the ultimate in virtualisation – it is dynamic power management.

Some virtualisation vendors are starting to build data mobility as a feature within their products. The natural next stage is to combine that mobility with power management, where you can move data onto a busy server and shut down the less busy ones. This is where data and applications become dynamic, and you can reduce power requirements like heating and cooling significantly.