When thinking about their 2011 IT initiatives, many firms I've spoken with are continuing to build out their virtual server environments. My colleague Gene Leganza has written an excellent report entitled The Top 15 Technology Trends EAs Should Watch that includes system management as a driver of continued virtualization. In addition, it is now becoming apparent that public and private cloud computing architectures are becoming more and more intertwined due to the intersection of virtualization platforms and management tools. From a technology standpoint, I believe that management is one of the key enablers of virtualized and cloud infrastructure. Therefore, as you're making your 2011 plans and virtualization or cloud computing inevitably pops up, think about how the following system management capabilities will influence your strategy:

1. Integration of public and private cloud management. Management tools for managing virtualization platforms will integrate with cloud services. In the beginning it will be about monitoring or provisioning. Later on, your system management infrastructure will orchestrate the movement between internal and external resource pools.

It is becoming very clear that data center facilities have metamorphosed from small computer rooms to industrialized facilities. Due to the cost and complexity of running such a facility, we believe that many firms will opt to get out of that business and use data centers that are built and run by firms that focus on mission-critical facilities. Most of us are familiar with suppliers like AT&T and Savvis, but very few have noticed the larger data center wholesalers behind the scenes. This is partly because data center wholesalers are more focused on facilities than IT, leasing large chunks of capacity, entire data centers, or even supplying data center space to popular hosters and outsourcers that resell them to corporate buyers.

However, for firms with large data centers that aren't interested in outsourcing IT, it sometimes makes economic sense to go directly to wholesalers like 365 Main, CoreSite, and Digital Realty Trust. Or maybe just CoreSite and Digital Realty Trust. As of yesterday, almost 1 million square feet of 365 Main data center space was acquired by Digital Realty Trust, which brings their portfolio to somewhere just shy of 16 million square feet.

From a technical architecture standpoint, we believe that larger, more efficient, and industrialized data centers are the future of IT. As servers have multiplied and become more power-hungry, we find that firms with older facilities have fewer architectural choices. For them, highly utilized racks of blades are simply not an option because they can not provide the required environment.

In my conversations with organizations implementing server virtualization, I've found that there seems to be a gap opening between the number of virtual machines firms are willing to run on a server, and the maximum number that could still reasonably fit on there. It looks like this will be aggravated by newer servers that can run twice as many virtual machines, along with more mature virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere that will support up to a TB of physical RAM. How long will it be before IT is expected to support 50 or 75 VMs per server?

If you want to learn more about this topic, please join my complimentary Webinar, "Forrester’s Top Three Recommendations For Implementing Server Virtualization" on June 11th at 11AM EST. You can register for the session by visiting:

www.forrester.com/virtualizationwebinar

By Galen Schreck

The rumors are true. Oracle has finally announced that its intent to acquire Virtual Iron for its virtual server management capabilities.

It's a nice fit for Oracle, which has its own Xen-based virtualization platform called Oracle VM. Up until now, Virtual Iron has been selling its management tools on its own Xen-derived hypervisor. The net result is that Oracle gets dynamic resource management, power management, and better virtual server capabilities. And since Virtual Iron was built to manage Xen-based systems, the integration should be done by lunchtime on the day of the acquisition.

The acquisition brings up some larger questions, however, such as how Oracle will integrate Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Virtual Iron Sun's xVM Server and xVM Ops Center. Now that it will supply hardware and virtualization platforms, Oracle will need to build out a stronger system management and automation portfolio.

The IT industry has made huge strides in software for change & configuration management, business service management, and IT process automation. Yet your data center facilities are probably living in the dark ages. For years, IT has been mapping out business services and mapping the underlying applications to the infrastructure it depends on. But the details never seem to go any further than the server level. I’m fairly certain that no one can tell you the racks, power circuits, or generators that a particular application depends on. And you can forget about managing applications’ power consumption – there’s no control past the UPS or PDU level.

The recent acquisition of Aperture by Emerson is noteworthy because it shows that the power and cooling giants are finally stirring in their lairs. Likewise, Emerson’s competitor Schneider Electric (through the better-known APC) has been building its own software portfolio focused on data center management for some time. Until recently, power and cooling vendors have been focused their limited software offerings on controlling their own infrastructure. But that’s changing -- now they’re shipping tools that can tell you the best location for that next rack of servers, or if you’ve already over-committed your physical infrastructure. There’s little competition from systems vendors like IBM and HP today, but it remains to be seen if Emerson and Schneider’s will become middleware providers or a direct competitors.