Trend 10: Hardware Investment Continues
?One of the difficulties that we?ve had is rapid growth?notjust student growth but data growth,? says Bob Diveley, executive director ofoperations and infrastructure at Columbus State University (CSU) of Columbus, Ga.?Rich media and those types of things were coming into play much more heavilythan ever before.?
So CSU built out its hardware backbone, virtualizing andthen deploying HP ProLiant servers within BladeSystem enclosures, along withstorage-area networks (SANs) from HP StorageWorks?both for primary storage and as backup.Virtualization is an efficiency initiative, but it has often been accompaniedby modernizing investments.
?We had begun virtualization about a year prior to investingin blades, but the blades investments were an obvious evolution to what we weredoing,? says Mack Ragan, CSU?s senior manager of infrastructure services.
This is key to understanding the survey data that showshardware infrastructure investment as a clear ongoing trend for 2012. It?s notso much that the number of organizations making significant deployments hasgone up; it?s more that the number reducing deployments has gone down.
After a savings period brought on in part byvirtualization?but also largely by the recession?increasing data usage andtechnology usage in general are driving new hardware infrastructure needs.
Even with a modernizedcomputing infrastructure, the continuing growth of data?not just in frequencybut in depth?is a harbinger of further investment that will be needed. ?Ourfuture growth will be in the SAN area,? Diveley predicts.
For more, read Baseline’s Top 10 Business Trends of2012.
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