The Next-Generation Data Center
Virtualization is becoming the new norm for enterprise data centers.
It’s also a key technology that can help you get to the cloud—and
these days, the cloud is top of mind for most IT managers.
If cloud is at the top of your agenda, you’re probably looking at it
as a way to improve server utilization, build efficiencies in the data
center, provide elastic scaling, support self-service, and provision
applications faster—as well as respond better to the business.
The virtualized data center is the first step and the foundation for
implementing a cloud environment.
Along with the promise of significant benefits, the cloud also
places greater demands on the data center. IT managers are
seeing increases in virtual machine (VM) density per server and
running into bottlenecks with existing storage and networking
architectures. This has led to greater capacity demands, increased
complexity, and more and more massive interconnections. Although
this setup may work for a while, IT managers are finding that
it doesn’t scale—reducing the flexibility and efficiency benefits
associated with cloud environments.
More Pressure on the
Data Center
IDC projects that more than 2.5 billion users will connect
to the Internet over the next five years, with more than
10 billion devices.1 Intel has estimated that this will require
8 times the amount of storage capacity, 16 times the
network capacity, and more than 20 times the current
compute capacity by 2015.2
1 IDC, ICT Outlook: Recovering Into a New World, Doc # DR2010_GS2_JG,
Mar 2010.
2 Intel Market Projections, 2009 to 2010. For eight times the network
capacity: 800 terabytes per second of IP traffic estimated on internal
Intel analysis, Network Supply/Demand 2010–2020 forecast. For 16
times the storage capacity: 60 exabytes of data stored from Barclays
Capital Storage Bits, September 2009, extrapolation by Intel for 2015.
For 20 times the compute capacity: Intel internal long-range planning
forecast extrapolated to 1 billion virtual servers using one virtual
machine per core.