The industry reflects, looks ahead

	Robert Kleinschmidt, Panduit Asia-Pacific
	There is now a renewed focus on increasing server density in data centers with blade servers while controlling cooling cost and power consumption through more efficient airflow and cooling techniques.

Q. What do you remember as the biggest industry news for 2007, and why?
Kleinschmidt: The biggest industry news in 2007 centered on the rise in office rents and power price hikes coupled with the elevated awareness of the need to be ever more environmentally friendly.

In the context of IT deployments, the pressure on enterprises is to lower cost by lowering their physical footprint requirements and dropping unnecessary power usage by designing and deploying efficient computing facilities. There is now a renewed focus on increasing server density in data centers with blade servers while controlling cooling cost and power consumption through more efficient airflow and cooling techniques.

Gartner issued a report warning IT heads to prepare a recession budget. What is your view?
There are many ways to look at the economy in 2008, and Gartner really has a couple of important predictions in its findings--that the US economy will go into recession and that Asia-Pacific will remain largely unaffected, with IT budgets expected to grow 5 percent.

That said, what matters in a budget depends very much on the priorities of each individual company, as well as the characters of the CEO, CFO and the board. Yes, they could contract spending in Asia-Pacific, going in line with what's happening in the U.S. market. However, a better strategy could be to continue to invest in Asia-Pacific to take advantage of the expected continued growth trends and therefore, in a way, compensate for the expected U.S. recession.

As the United States goes into recession, this usually translates into outsourcing opportunities for Asia. As a result of this, plus the continued regional growth, a significant trend in Asia will be the growth of data center services. According to the Broad Group, a global data center consulting group, the market in Asia for data centers will grow from US$1.2 billion in 2007 to US$2 billion by 2010.

In the light of rising energy costs, this growth will be led by data center operators that have an efficient design and sustainable business models. For example, the Broad Group also predicts that data centers will start to charge by power consumption. Internal and external data center service providers would do well to realize this trend and think about how to prepare for it.

Name three hot technologies to watch in 2008.
•  InfiniBand--We expect the demand for high-performance computing (HPC) and storage networks to drive up demand for enabling technologies such as InfiniBand. In the old days, HPC meant fast servers packed closely together. However, InfiniBand technology is challenging this practice.

Typically thought of as a clustering protocol best applied within the walls of an IT center to connect servers to storage, Panduit is now seeing an increase in demand for use of InfiniBand to merge InfiniBand fabrics into a unified network, connecting high-performance computing clusters. The InfiniBand of today and tomorrow is expected to provide high performance, moderate cost, high bandwidth and low latency for data transport that will further drive HPC solutions.

•  10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper--With Gigabit networking becoming a standard on desktops and notebooks, technology departments are suddenly faced with the prospect of aggregating the bandwidth on the backend with 10 Gigabit (10G) trunks in the data center.

Previously, costly fiber links were the only way to run 10G but now, network managers can run 10G in the data center over standard lower cost Category 6A copper cabling. In addition, the availability of low cost 10G bandwidth is also driving the migration of storage area networks from fiber channel onto standard IP networks.

•  Cooling technology--Rising energy costs have made the issue of energy efficient infrastructures more prominent. Additionally, with the global focus on reducing climate change and being environmentally responsible, Panduit believes that there will be more innovation with regard to environmentally sustainable solutions.

Data centers constitute a large portion of enterprises' energy usage needs, with 'cooling; accounting for a substantial amount. The rapid shift to blade servers for lower 'cost per space' has exacerbated the thermal issue and thermal management solutions will be in high demand to reduce business costs, yet allow for adequate protection of IT assets.

For example, in a high-density blade server environment, eight server cabinet doors using advanced water cooling technology to provide direct cooling to the blade server cabinet can replace one Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) while doubling servers and halving the number of cabinets.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
... How to move to a converged IP network while dealing with the proliferation of devices, like wireless access points, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) phones, and security cameras, that need to be connected to the network.

When moving toward a converged network, proper planning and network design are essential, as are enabling technologies like Power over Ethernet (PoE) that will manage power to devices across the enterprise. PoE also helps business continuity in a converged environment as continuous power supply systems can be centralized for all PoE-powered devices such that in the event of a power failure, critical communications are not affected.

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