Colin McNamara Feb 3, 2009

I am seeing the same thing as you. Primarily the customers I have are running out of power, can’t cool their systems fast enough, and don’t have enough space. I think that it is obvious that Scoble spends more time in front of a camera, than in front of a customer.

Anyone in front of a customer will realize that computing needs are still increasing, and the need to take an end to end look at applications and system virtualization to lower the overall cost of computing is more relevant now then ever.

Douglas Gourlay Feb 3, 2009

Now Colin be nice!  We like Robert and what he writes!  Besides someday I hope to do one of those cool interviews with him about networking, virtualiztion, clouds and such from some obscure part of Half Mon Bay so don’t ruin my chances ok? 

I think we may see a time of negative-growth in DCs, but it would only be after significant portions of the infrastructure were virtualized, and far enough into the future that the effect of the near-term financial crisis have the time to seep in and affect IT budgets and long-term capital investments/depreciation.

dg

Colin McNamara Feb 3, 2009

Sorry Doug, I didn’t mean to come across as mean. I just see customers every day facing the challenges of shoehorning year 2009 infrastructures into year 2000 data centers.

Eventually customers will move to 80%+ virtualization, but right now most are stuck only virtualizing 10% or so. Soon, with the 1000V and other advances bringing virtual systems security and performance in line with physical systems we may see some wiggle room in our Data Centers. Until them, we still face the same challenges that were there before the financial crisis.

shreyas shah Feb 4, 2009

DG,

I have seen DC consolidation fom 100s into few. One of the Financial institute consolidated 173 DC into 3. One of the High tech company consolidated 87 into 6. DCs are not going away ... Consolidation will be first task and next move will be to move non-core operations to cloud to start with.

Shreyas

Abner Germanow Feb 4, 2009

I’ll second your argument. Yes companies are cutting back and the downturn is clearly limiting what companies are able to invest in (to Colin’s point of having to make do with what they have in many cases)

IDC’s survey data on what IT departments are cutting starts with investments in client devices (PCs and mobile) and ends with infrastructure.

The other important thing to remember is that nothing about the causes of this recession fundamentally change the underlying trends driving networking or for that matter data center spending. Obviously, the growth rates all slow and shift, but even Lehman’s datacenter is still in operation after being purchased by Barclays!

The other question is will we see a net negative number of DCs over the next three years, or will we see fewer, but larger DCs due to data center consolidation?

John Kissane Feb 4, 2009

Doug - pretty much on board with your comment; it’s been rare but we have seen a few instances where a client built out a new dc but is now delaying populating it.

M. R. Pamidi, Ph. D. Feb 5, 2009

I’m afraid we are fighting over semantics. Robert Scoble said, “...get rid of data centers or minimize them."

So, if “One of the Financial institute [sic] consolidated 173 DC into 3. One of the High tech company [sic] consolidated 87 into 6,” didn’t both get rid of a bunch of data centers AND minimize them?

shreyas shah Feb 5, 2009

These 173 DC and 87 DCs were world wide, there is also compliance criteria along with DR+backup+redundancy of DC played big role in consolidation.

WAN bandwidth is cheaper than used to be 5 years ago.

I think you are right, consolidation (fewer DC and fewer systems within DC (Do more with less hw)) and convergence (compute x86 & Network) will be the game of DC in next decade or so…...