Data central

In 2008, Middle East enterprises had the unique opportunity to deploy and use state-of-the-art technologies as they set up greenfield datacentres. NME examines the server room trends of the year gone by, and the ones the new year will bring.

These twelve months have been the year of the datacentre. Well, it was in the Middle East at least.

In the region, where infrastructure has consistently dominated IT spend for the past few years, most enterprises were intent on building brand new, or greenfield, datacentres in 2008.

This is one of the key reasons that the Middle East offers an arguably unparalled view into the larger trends that affected datacentres in 2008. Free of the legacy solutions that burden counterparts in more mature markets, IT managers in the Middle East had the opportunity to choose and use state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technologies. This was truly a unique opportunity that many chose to use to gain a competitive edge for their respective organisations.

But what were the larger trends in datacentres that influenced investment patterns in the Middle East?

The virtual world beckons

Any conversation about predominant datacentre trends in the region has to be dominated by the subject of virtualisation.

"In my opinion, virtualisation has been the biggest technology trend that has affected the region over the past year. Virtualisation is a key factor when transforming datacentres, because it allows the creation of homogeneous layers in the infrastructure and in the management layers, reducing overall costs, improving the quality of service and the utilisation of resources," says Antonio Gallegom, EMEA south infrastructure consulting solution principal, EMC.

Agrees Anthony Harrison, manager of systems engineering at Symantec in the region: "Server virtualisation is one of the technologies most transforming and affecting our world today. This is simply because it delivers real benefits. It reduces server spend, makes adding new servers quick and painless, increases infrastructure flexibility and reduces planned downtime. Moreover, it helps reduce facilities costs because you are not constantly adding new equipment."

Benefits of virtualisation, especially in the server arena, began to be tapped by enterprises in the Middle East, whether in building greenfield ones or in upgrading legacy systems. According to some, this adoption lapped on even to the final end-user stage.

"Virtualisation essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical limitations.

In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high availability of resources, increased security, and improved disaster recovery when you build a virtual infrastructure," says Thomas Huber, regional manager systems engineers, EMEA east at VMWare.

"Server and desktop virtualisation, mainframe type reliability and availability on distributed systems were the major developments of the year. The end-user work force has become mobile requiring access to any systems and any applications from anywhere. Being able to virtualise the desktop means easy access and rich experience of working from anywhere like you were working in your office.

Server virtualisation means customers can now consolidate their distributed workloads and centralise their servers resulting in lower total cost of ownership, ease of management, faster recovery times, and faster roll outs or updates and technology upgrades," says Noman Qader, territory sales manager at Citrix.

With pilots turning into production projects in many enterprises in the Middle East, these end-users are beginning to look at management solutions that will enable them to get higher levels of productivity from their virtualised environments.

Not just virtual

Though virtualisation is high on everybody's mind, it would be wrong to consider it as the dominant trend of this year. The server farm was radically changed in most enterprises, and often without virtualisation.

There have been huge advances in x86 architecture servers, with reference to power consumption and management, in addition to processing capabilities.

These along with increasing reliability, have accelerated x86's shift into the datacentre. The maturity of supporting technologies like virtualisation, and server monitoring, power management, and management applications not only increase efficiency of the servers, but also allow for dynamic responses, and an extremely high level of automation.

Dynamic infrastructure using the above technologies, leads to ‘green' datacentres," says Chandan Mehta, enterprise product manager at Fujitsu-Siemens Computers.

"There were a number of developments that influenced the datacentre, such as moving towards large scale processor platforms with a strong emphasis on virtualisation. Also there is the new concept of a ‘unified fabric', which has been embraced by two major switch manufacturers, Cisco and Brocade," says Asef Baddar, business development manager at Leviton.