The next five years will see agility become the primary measure of data-centre excellence, said Gartner. Analysts advised that through 2012 virtualisation will be the most significant factor on data centres, as it greatly reduces the number of servers, space, power and cooling demands and ultimately enables agility.

“An agile data centre will handle exceptions effectively, but learn from exceptions to improve standards and processes,” said Tom Bittman, Gartner vice-president and distinguished analyst.  “Agility will become a major business differentiator in a connected world.  Business agility requires agility in the data centre, which is difficult as many of the technologies for improving the intelligence and self-management of IT are very immature, but they will evolve over the next ten years.”

Within the data centre, agility should be measured in terms that make sense to the business, such as the time and cost to deploy new servers, to install new software or to fix a problem. 

As a core enabler of agility, virtualisation is the abstraction of IT resources in a way that makes it possible to creatively build IT services. While the vast majority of large organisations have started to virtualise their servers, Gartner estimates that currently only 6% of the addressable market is penetrated by virtualisation, a figure set to rise to 11% by 2009.  However, the number of virtualised machines deployed on servers is expected to grow from 1.2 million today to 4 million in 2009.

“Virtualisation changes virtually everything,” said Bittman.  He explained that it is not just about consolidation but also includes transitioning resource management from individual servers to pools, increasing server deployment speeds up to 30 times.