Dell’s Data Center Predictions for 2011

Paul Prince, CTO, Enterprise Product Group at Dell (www.dell.com)

  • Cloud Computing Will Drive New Deployments and Heightened Debates
    The industry will see the adoption of more private and public cloud solutions but debate will continue on the best approach – open architectures or closed, appliance models.
  • Customers will Continue to Reinvest and Rearchitect Their Technology Environments
    Customers will continue to invest and revamp their architectures; Dell predicts that data center spending will continue to rebound but customers will place an added emphasis on efficiency, automation and best-of-breed solutions.
  • Customers are Not Just Reinvesting, They are Rethinking the Data Center
    Customers are interested in their IT delivering a competitive advantage, and they are becoming more aware that flexibility and productivity are benefits of cloud-based architectures.
  • Data Volumes Will Continue to Spiral Out of Control Driving Scale-Out Storage and Data Management Opps
    Scale-out storage architectures coupled with better data management solutions will drive significant growth in storage in 2011. Products and solutions from acquired companies such as EqualLogic, Ocarina, Exanet and Compellent will help customers manage data challenges.
  • Virtualization Will Continue to Become Pervasive But…
    Customers will turn their focus to data center automation, provisioning and the orchestration of both hardware and applications in multi-hypervisor environments.
  • Application IT managers Will Be the Next IT Superher
    Dell believes that application managers are going to be new IT superheroes. They will increasingly help hardware administrators determine the type of solutions to purchase.
  • Networks Will Continue to Converge on Ethernet
    The rise of 10GbE adoption will start to take hold for companies with high bandwidth needs. This will have an impact on fibre channel and other fabric options.
  • With the continued growth of virtualization, and fabric convergence, the traditional highly complex hierarchical network will be questioned
    Early adopters will begin deployments of flattened networks, focusing on optimizing around virtualization and managing from the edge of the network, using either proprietary vendor methods or early standards like TRILL and Openflow.