Links List 12.5.08

December 5th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Gartner shared their top 10 ‘disruptive data-center technologies’ at their annual data center conference. According to Gartner analyst Carl Claunch, data centers will be built in separate zones or pods rather than as one massive structure. The list includes storage virtualization, cloud computing, new server architectures, PC virtualization, enterprise mashups, specialized systems, social software and social networking, unified communications, zones and pods, and green IT.

IDC forecasts a 5% decline in U.S. IT spending growth over the next 12 months. IDC analyst John Gantz said, “There is a possibility that IT spending will be more deeply affected by the financial crisis than our current forecast indicates.” Hunh.

Actuate released their Open Source Survey for 2008. We’ve talked before about making sure to understand the context for any survey results; Serdar Yegulalp does a good job on the InformationWeek Open Source Weblog at picking apart this one. The survey covers only four geographic areas, North America, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Turns out that they number one reason for respondents not using OSS is the “risk” – although “risk” is not defined. And what really shouldn’t be a surprise, open source spreads by word of mouth; over 40% of respondents rely on colleagues to keep them up to date with the latest OSS developments.

Healthcare and the cloud? Healthcare IT leaders, academics, biomedical researchers, medical and scientific consulting firm reps met with Amazon and other cloud vendors at an invitation-only event sponsored by Harvard Medical School and Amazon Web Services. Due to the ‘elasticity, scalability, pay-as-you-go model, cloud computing can potentially provide huge cost savings, flexible high-throughput, and ease of use for resource-strapped biomedical researchers…” Think of the human genome project and the incredible amount of complex information that needs to be collected and analyzed. But will researchers be able to get past stringent security and privacy requirements for medical/health data?

Storage, storage, storage. I’ve heard it too much at the Gartner Data Center conference (from attendees and analysts) to ignore it. If you’re serious about virtualization, you need to get serious about the storage implications, if you haven’t already. Registration for the Storage Networking World (SNW) Spring 2009 conference is now open. Produced by Computerworld and co-owned by Computerworld and the StorageNetworking Industry Association, the conference will focus on cloud computing, virtualization, green IT and solid state storage.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Add comment December 5th, 2008