How System Center Aligns to Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends

[Updated Mar 2: Removed original image of Gartner slide image due to Gartner policy – this can still be viewed in the Gartner presentation.]

A while ago, my colleague Jeff Wettlaufer posted a blog that presented a post on CIO.com that presented the “5 Must-have IT Management Technologies for 2010.” Of the areas Jeff presented, it was great to see how System Center is already forging ahead to enable the delivery of those technologies and capabilities to customers with products you can purchase and use TODAY!

In a similar vein, analyst firm Gartner recently performed a webcast where they listed the 10 technology trends to watch for, along with the timeframe of when each trend is expected to hit (starting in 2009 through to 2011). The presentation from that webcast can be viewed here.

With regards to delivering at least four of those ten trends, again System Center is well-placed to aid customers in adopting those trends – particularly in the datacenter – as follows:

• Virtualization. Continued investments in System Center have unlocked the ability to intelligently move from traditional physical server-focused deployments to full virtualization projects, with the ability to span multiple hypervisor technologies and track health and performance of those virtualized assets.
• Energy & Green IT. Particularly with the release of Windows Servers, organizations will see marked abilities to reduce their carbon footprint, particularly through recurring energy usage. Existing and ongoing investments in System Center, such as the operations management pack for power management, help monitor and manage power profiles and usage across Windows Server 2008 R2 deployments.
• Complex Resource Tracking. Again with a strong reference to energy management, capabilities such as power monitoring and Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) enable dynamic and automated response to situations that require workloads to be moved across servers to optimize performance or energy utilization in your datacenters.
• System Density. With growing costs associated with server power and energy consumption, it is noted that virtualization is a key to success to align cost-benefit ratios. System Center already assists with the ability to identify systems that are candidates to become virtual hosts or virtual guests, as well as aid in the transition-to and management-of the resulting virtualized infrastructure.

For those of you interested in learning more about Gartner’s thoughts you can view the Gartner webcast presentation here. Also be sure to take a look at the System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters to see how System Center can aid you in adopting and absorbing the benefits of those trends.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters