We came across a Gartner Bulletin from November 2010 describing data center transformation terms that Gartner customers were searching on Gartner.com. While it is now somewhat dated, we thought it still offered relevant insight into the topics on people’s minds.

The top search areas were virtualization, energy, power and consolidation. Not any surprises, but clear confirmation of the issues that IT pros are working to address. Of note, searches on the term “private cloud” went from zero in 1Q2008 to 349 in 1Q2010. You can easily imagine that number being much larger in 2Q2011!

The Gartner data is consistent with the observations we are seeing in our deployments and customer planning sessions. While data centers remain central to operations in virtually all corporations, academic institutions, and public sector organizations, the design/structure of and deployment/management strategies for data centers are changing at a breakneck pace. Organizations are sensing the need for rapid change and working to quickly adapt their data center plans to account for nimble deployment, variable loads and the rapid growth of ‘data’ being collected and used in operations. Concepts like virtualization have taken route to help make better use of hardware while saving on energy costs and reducing space demands. And consistent with our customer observations, energy costs are clearly an issue that executives are seeking to contain. Of course, if we are to bring this survey forward, we would expect much more interest in cloud computing strategies including public, private and hybrid clouds.

We’re interested in your thoughts on this topic…a sort of informal update as of June 2011! Let us know the topics you are searching.