According to Gartner’s recent survey on data center infrastructure challenges and trends, the top three challenges for large enterprises are data growth, followed by system performance and scalability, and network congestion and connectivity architecture.

The survey was conducted from June through August 2010 and collected data from 1,004 large enterprises in eight different countries.

To offset potential problems with data growth, 62% of respondents plan on investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011. Respondents also indicated plans to implement storage consolidation projects, storage management tools and additional security measures to offset data growth issues.

Naveen Mishra, principal research analyst at Gartner, noted that the second biggest challenge, system performance and scalability, emerged as a result of the economic downturn seen last year.

“Many data center managers were forced to defer infrastructure upgrades and extend technology refresh cycles in 2009 and, as a result, are now dealing with an aging infrastructure or, in some cases, product obsolescence,” Mishra said.

The third biggest data center infrastructure challenge, network congestion and connectivity architecture, goes hand-in-hand with server virtualization projects. Virtualized servers require higher I/O, and traditional LAN switches are not able to meet the upsurge in network demand. In most respondents’ data centers, there is also a shortage of switches with 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity.

As far as predictions for 2011, 30% of survey respondents plan on building a new data center by the end of the year and more than half of them said they will expand capacity in their existing data center. Top technologies to invest in for next year are server virtualization (67% of respondents), application consolidation or rationalization (56%) and blade servers (51%).

The Gartner Data Center Conference will be held in Las Vegas, Dec. 6-9.

On Tuesday, Equinix cut its third quarter revenue projections to the range of $328 million to $330 million. It had expected revenue in at about $335 million to $338 million. The company cited difficulty in signing longer-term contracts even with discounted services. And on that note, analysts and stock sellers were off to the races.

Shares of Akamai, which makes technology that speeds delivery of content over the Web, also suffered as did that of Rackspace, Terramark and Internap. At one point Equinix shares were off 35% to $69 per share, down from yesterday’s close of $105.09.

While Wall Street tends to overreact to earnings comments, there has been long-simmering worry that companies may find it easier to keep their IT running in house vs. doling it out to colocation companies and other service providers. When that happens enough, the huge data centers, many of which were built to run cloud infrastructure, could have trouble paying their bills, as Chuck Goolsbee wrote for SearchDataCenter.com two years ago.

Still, others cautioned not to read too much into this selling frenzy. For one thing, Equinix runs a couple dozen cloud providers in its facilities. One of them–Amazon Web Services, in fact–has seen its overall usage double in a year. Not too shabby.

Let us know what you think about this post; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com or follow us on twitter.

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According to multiples sources reached by LeMagIT, Opteron servers have disappeared from Oracle’s x86 roadmap and the manufacturer seems decided to embrace an all Intel product line based on Xeon 5600 and Xeon 7500 chips. Even at the high end of its line, Oracle is about to replace its flagship X4640 by a new octo-socket server based on Xeon 7500 CPUs.

AMD refused comment.

The news actually comes as no surprise. Oracle has been mostly quiet regarding future server products for Intel’s latest Xeon chips and AMD’s latest Opteron, and AMD announced a limited number of big OEM partners when unveiling its newest x86 Opteron processor, dubbed Magny Cours.

During a recent interview, Cisco wouldn’t comment on whether it would offer AMD-based servers in the future, but it doesn’t seem like they’ll be doing it soon.

“We’re always evaluating CPUs, and we’re looking at AMD,” said Paul Durzan, Cisco product director. “Intel is very clearly the performance leader, so we’re happy with Intel being our CPU provider.”

That said, two of the biggest x86 server makers, HP and Dell, are selling AMD-based servers. Those two alone account for well over 50% of the x86 server market. Still, it is a blow to AMD when three major server OEMs — IBM, Oracle/Sun and now Cisco — are at best lukewarm to your product.

Most of it is pretty standard. The three include:

• PS700: Four 3GHz Power7 processor cores, 8 DIMM slots, 64GB max memory
• PS701: Eight 3GHz Power7 cores, 16 DIMMs, 128GB max memory
• PS702: Basically a double-wide 701

All are capable of running AIX, IBM i and Novell and Red Hat Linux distros, and can be mixed and matched in the same BladeCenter chassis with x86 blades.

IBM also announced a new version of AIX called AIX 6 Express Edition, catered toward small and medium businesses who are looking for cheaper licensing costs and don’t mind fewer functions from the full version of AIX. Differences in the AIX versions include, for example, how many cores and memory it supports. While the standard version supports up to 64 cores, Express only supports a maximum of four.

I asked Steve Sibley, IBM Power Systems marketing director, whether the Express is meant to discourage defections off Power to cheaper x86 platforms.

“It certainly gives the low-end environment a bit more competitive price point, so that clients buying smaller systems don’t have to pay for the whole scalability,” he said.

This isn’t too much of a surprise, nor is it that much of a blow to Itanium at this point. While Itanium may have had dreams long ago of completely taking over the server processor market, that tree has just not borne fruit, and those dreams are long dead. Most people now know that Itanium is largely a chip used by old HP PA-RISC users who mainly want a new platform to port their HP-UX applications to.

Still, it is one more chip in the armor of the ever-resilient, yet ever-declining Unix market, and I’ll be working on a story about it this week. If you are running Windows Server on Itanium and want to give me your thoughts, e-mail me at mfontecchio(at)techtarget.com.

Cisco, of course, contends that UCS can work just as well in existing facilities. In the story, one mid-Atlantic value added reseller (VAR) talked about the challenges of installing UCS in existing data centers.

The mid-Atlantic VAR, who is affiliated with both HP and Cisco, agreed that Cisco UCS is a tougher sell into existing data center facilities, and that some Cisco gear is a harder sale than other Cisco gear. For example, Cisco’s rack server UCS can go into an existing data center more easily than the blade model because the rack doesn’t require the Nexus switch, he said.

Whether a customer already runs Cisco networking gear in the data center could be a big factor in the purchasing process. Those shops have already bought into the Cisco data center story at least to some extent, VARs said.

I took a briefing on the UCS news, which basically integrates the new Intel Nehalem and Nehalem-EX blade and rack servers into the product. It includes the company’s first four-socket servers, but does not yet include AMD-based servers.

“Intel is very clearly the performance leader, so we’re happy with Intel being our CPU provider,” Paul Durzan, a product director at Cisco, said.

And now, to the blah blah blah. When I and another reporter talked to Cisco, they sent along a PowerPoint presentation on the news. In addition to the slides, there were notes accompanying each one. On a slide at the end summarizing the news, the notes field starts off with “So why Cisco you ask” and then there are two bullet points, as follows:

• Improve business agility and performance
• Blah, blah, blah

Thanks for the laugh, Cisco!

The list includes HP, Dell, Gateway (Acer), Cray, Microtech/Atipa, Appro, Asus, Colfax, SGI, Supermicro, TYAN, ZT Systems, Penguin and Microway. Notably absent are IBM, Oracle/Sun and Cisco. An AMD spokesman said he couldn’t confirm that these would be the only partners offering “Magny Cours”-based servers, but they were the only ones who issues releases demonstrating their support on Monday.

IBM does offer some AMD-based servers, such as the System x3755 based on the six-core AMD Opteron. So it will be interesting to see if IBM will offer anything based on Magny Cours. Sun had a line of AMD servers as well, so we’ll see if Oracle carries that tradition. As for Cisco, who knows. Its first line of Unified Computing Systems (UCS) servers were Intel-based only, and when I recently asked someone at Cisco about it, they said they couldn’t comment on future products.

Most server vendors – HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu – made server announcements this week regarding the six-core Intel Xeon 5600 processor, codenamed Westmereand designed for one- and two-socket systems. Intel is expected to make another announcement at the end of this month for the Xeon Nehalem EX, an eight-core chip built for four-socket systems. Sometime thereabouts is when Cisco will announce its newest Xeon servers, according to Daniel Bounds, Cisco marketing manager for its Unified Computing System.

Bounds did talk about some performance benchmarks Cisco acheived. They include results in the VMware VMmark and various SPEC benchmarks, with details available here. The benchmarks do give some insight into the Xeon 5600 servers Cisco will offer. For example, its UCS C250 M2 server looks to be a two-socket machine capable of running two six-core Xeon 5600s. In the benchmark test, the machine included two Xeon 5680s.

Also, will Cisco start offering AMD Opteron-based servers? It did not do so in its first iteration of UCS, and it’s staying mum about the second generation. AMD is planning on announcing a new 12-core chip by the end of this month, dubbed “Magny Cours,” to compete with Intel’s most recent x86 Xeon chips. But Bounds would not reveal whether Cisco will offer AMD-based blades, saying they “can’t comment on any unannounced products.”

See some of our recent coverage of Intel and AMD x86 processors:

• New Intel Xeon 5600 chips can swap into 5500s
• Intel Nehalem processor users content with status quo
• AMD ships 12-core x86 Opteron processor
• Comparing Intel Xeons: 32nm 5600s vs. 45nm 5500s

• Enterprise Storage and Servers had $4.4 billion in revenue, up 11% over last year
• Industry Standard Server revenue increased 27%
• Storage decreased 3%
• Business Critical Systems revenue dove 22%
• Blade revenue was up 24%

The full release is here.

The box, as usual, will support running AIX, IBM i and Linux. IBM will sell the box this year, saying the machine will be able to run up to 256 Power7 processor cores. Seeing as the Power7 chip can support up to eight cores per chip, compared to two for Power6, it looks like the Power7 big iron will have an architecture similar to the Power 595, just with Power7 instead of Power6 processors.

IBM unveiled the first of its Power7 servers earlier this week.