2 of 10 are “disruptive” according to Gartner

Gartner held their Data Center conference during the last week of November where a presentation was given by Research Vice President Carl Claunch on his view of the top 10 disruptive technologies for the data center.

Two of those 10 are management/automation oriented and have already found their way into the reference model or Data Center Automation “Blueprint” that we’ve been working on.

1) IT operations process automation (e.g., the DCA Blueprint currently calls this process orchestration)
Gartner estimates that operational error causes about 40% of all outages. Why? Because as technology gets cheaper, the same number of people have more to manage. Errors will happen.

“When you have these two trends, they intersect at points, and it’s time to shift what was human labor to automation,” he said. “As we move to a real-time infrastructure, we need to find a way of automating all of these tasks.”

2) CMDBs (e.g., the DCA Blueprint currently calls this this Resource Reconciliation)
According to Gartner, through 2009 the implementation of a configuration and change management strategy will reduce downtime by as much as 35%.

“Knowing what is actually happening is important to making sure it is working right,” he said. “If you try to respond to a problem based on outdated information, you make mistakes.”

Some of the others find themselves covered by our categorization of the Data Center Infrastructure itself.

These by far are the two hottest areas of the 6 functional areas currently covered by the model (e.g., DCA Blueprint).  They are also probably the most complex to solve.  Both require significant initial start-up costs to codify or integrate current technologies, software or processes into the functional applications themselves.  But the strategic and tactical ROI from what I’ve seen and heard so far is tremendous.

Special thanks to Mark Fontecchio’s complete article over on searchdatacenter.com where I grabbed the two snippets from on the two disruptive technologies.