How nice would it be to have a crystal ball to map out a course through uncertain times?

That thought has probably struck more than a few data center managers of late, considering that this is probably about as uncertain a time as any have ever seen.

There is no doubt that the data center is on the cusp of a radical transformation from its present form. By this time next decade, it will probably have only the vaguest resemblance to what we know today, at least from the inside. Virtualization, cloud computing, unified networking and the steady march of advanced processing and storage technologies will produce a data center that is both more flexible and more diverse than the hardware-centric, siloed environment that has existed for the past 30 years.

Indeed, the very idea of a wholly owned data center will seem alien to many organizations, particularly small ones who will come to know the benefits of purchasing their resources as online services, much as earlier industries came to purchase electricity from third-party providers rather than build and maintain their own power plants. And yet underneath all this change, the fundamental components of IT infrastructure -- servers, storage networking -- will retain much of their familiarity because, at the end of the day, it still takes good old hardware and software to give data any meaning, no matter how much abstraction is added to the architecture.

"Every established business has a starting point," says Steve Oberlin, co-founder and chief scientist at Cassatt Corporation, which specializes in IT resource management, "and that means your IT infrastructure is probably already a heterogeneous mix of platforms and architectures. What IT departments would really like to do is run their own data centers with the efficiency of Amazon or Google."

To that end, then, it appears that the industry is pursuing three interrelated development paths aimed at improving efficiency and performance, while at the same time lowering costs and reducing complexity.

Virtualization

The first one is virtualization. While the technology in its present form has been around for a few years now, its focus is beginning to shift away from simple server consolidation to a broader role in fostering resource flexibility by separating the traditional link among data, applications, and the hardware they reside in.

To some, the idea of a "virtual data center" is not so far-fetched as it once seemed to be, although what that means exactly is still very much up in the air.

"My definition is an environment that is highly efficient, highly optimized and highly productive, where you are able to do more with available resources," says Greg Schulz, founder of analyst firm StorageIO and author of "The Green and Virtual Data Center." "It's more about how to be more flexible, to move services and storage around to meet the needs of different workloads. It's a way to leverage resources more effectively."

In a virtual environment, time-honored techniques like passive standby systems are a thing of the past because administrators will have the power of near-instant provisioning of virtual machines should one physical system go down. So even though two machines are in full active mode, one can always handle the workload of the other in case of failover, so the enterprise gains a more efficient use of its infrastructure.

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