There are a number of trends that are impacting data centers today, many of which will have a profound impact on how businesses consume data center resources.  These can provide a variety of challenges.  Perhaps most obvious, is the fact that people and businesses are more connected than ever with the proliferation of mobile devices and tablets.  These new devices are driving more applications, more users, and an insatiable appetite for network bandwidth.  This blog will discuss a few of these trends and how Cisco is shaping its data center strategy to enable customers to meet these rapidly changing demands.

Another major data center trend that is driving change in the data center is the continued adoption of virtualization technologies.  What's interesting is that although server spending has remained relatively flat for over a decade, there is still a great deal of "head room" for companies to further adopt virtualization.

In fact, IDC studies show that many applications are yet to be virtualized as the chart to the right indicates.  However, virtualization is driving complexity elsewhere including the network, software and storage.  So what has created a more agile server, has not necessarily created a more agile system.

The next major trend is that of Cloud Computing, with more business leveraging private, public or potentially even hybrid cloud models.  Some actually forecast that there could eventually be a small number of mega data centers and companies will all leverage capacity exclusively from these since they can offer extreme efficiencies.  The truth is, there are two ends of the spectrum, some customers will prefer to host their own infrastructure and others may choose to use Cloud providers exclusively.  We are finding today that many customers are somewhere in the middle and choose their model based on the application needs.

Finally, one of the hottest topics in the industry lately is around big data and the actual dollar value that businesses are deriving from making sense from tons of unstructured data.  Virtually every field is turning to gathering big data, with mobile sensor networks, cameras on the ground and in the air, and archives storing information published on the web. The challenge is ON to invent new tools and techniques that can mine vast stores of data to inform decision making in ways that were previously unimagined.   The fact that we can derive more knowledge by joining related information together and recognizing correlations can inform and enrich numerous aspects of every day life.  For example, either in real time for traffic or financial conditions, short term evolution such as medical or weather, or in prediction situations such as business, crime or disease trending.

Whatever the requirement, data center providers need to support all of the models above and work to solve these major challenges to remove complexity, increase efficiencies, and streamline the businesses ability to react more quickly to new opportunities.

So how do we handle the massive increases that are coming in terms of network bandwidth, compute, storage and software? 

That said, businesses are under pressure from a number of angles including business as well as technology challenges.  From a business perspective, one of the most significant challenges we are seeing today is around business agility, or the ability of business to react more quickly to changing business opportunities.  How can businesses turn on resources and launch applications more quickly.  In many cases, those that can react more quickly gain significant competitive advantage.  Those that can't, are missing opportunities for revenue growth.  In addition, business must deal with 24