Datacentres are shrinking. Consolidation and virtualisation are starting to sweep across IT organisations, making them leaner, keener and greener.

Automation is simplifying the task of managing datacentres, while outsourcing and the promise of utility computing are giving firms more options to reduce the size of their in-house estate.

Such trends have generally only been seen in larger organisations to date, with the financial services sector further ahead than most. But as the business and efficiency benefits become available to an ever greater pool of organisations over the next three to five years ­ see Which type of organisation will need datacentre skills – see Which types of organisation will need datacentre skills? below – ­ the quantity and make-up of datacentre skills required by most firms is likely to change considerably.

Virtualisation in particular will become a no-brainer. Tenfold increases in server utilisation are not uncommon, and such requirements create associated financial and energy demands. “The emphasis for chief information officers (CIOs) now and moving forward is on doing more with less,” says William Fellows, principal analyst at The 451 Group.

When it comes to datacentre management, implementation of virtualisation and automation technologies will mean not just less kit, but ultimately fewer staff in the datacentre. “Of course, some organisations will not need any datacentre staff at all, if they outsource or use a hosting company for everything,” says Fellows. “However, most organisations we speak to are considering this for up to 25 per cent of their capacity needs going forward.”

Even for the predicted three-quarters of the IT estate left in-house, automation means many former datacentre monitoring and management tasks will simply cease to exist. “While I don’t see any reduction of skills needed on the development side, the automation technologies coming along now, in effect, take the human element out of managing the datacentre,” says Fellows. “There are any number of automation technology companies out there ­ and you have a sense of how important they are going to be by the fact that they are being bought by the likes of HP and the other major players.”

Alan Rodger, research analyst at Butler Group, says the drive in infrastructure management software is very much towards increasingly automated capabilities. “Such trends are not just to see what is going on, but also to determine the capabilities to sort out any problems automatically,” he says. “Any datacentre worker sitting around watching if the lights are on ­ and I am sure they exist ­ should feel very vulnerable indeed.”

While new technologies might reduce overall headcount in the datacentre, the specialists who remain will need a broader, more business-focused skill set, says Rodger. The training required will probably take several years and requires its own set of skills ­ – see Top datacentre skills during the next three years, below. However, an increasing number of users are optimistic about the potential benefits of introducing automation, storage area networks (SANs), virtualisation and other emerging datacentre technologies.

Michael Taylor, head of IT service delivery at distribution and supply chain specialist NYK Logistics, says he envisages many of the management aspects to be simplified by employing emerging datacentre technologies. “I do not see any significant skills challenges on that front going forward,” he says.

“We are looking at the usual technologies in this area, such as virtualisation, SANs and blade servers for Intel-based systems estate. Having built our high-level technical strategy roadmap we are now in the process of fleshing out some of the business cases. I believe there will be major long-term benefits ­ by which I mean a return on investment in three to five years with big payback opportunities thereafter.”

Taylor says NYK plans to ensure it has the skills in place to realise the paybacks, with the firm’s technicians engaging with third parties to first of all identify solutions that service business need, without necessarily having a deeper understanding of how to implement and support those technologies’ systems.

“Having honed those suppliers down to the usual suspects, they are now engaged in formal training to reach the necessary level of competence,” he says. “Our approach is to engage external expertise where appropriate, but to ensure that at the end of any implementation we are well placed to support the technologies internally.”

The University of Plymouth is further down the road, having almost completed a virtualisation project that has allowed the organisation to reduce the number of servers in its datacentre from 280 to 30. Adrian Jane, the university’s infrastructure and operations manager, says there has been a noticeable impact on the skills required by datacentre staff.

“We are seeing a move away from pure hardware skills ­ which were what we used to have ­ to staff needing a wider spread of business and technical understanding,” he says. “Here we were quite fortunate to have people who, although they are very good with hardware, also found it relatively easy to scale out what they are doing beyond the hardware ­ which is effectively what you are doing with virtualisation.”

While the future will predominantly be led by standard technologies and big suppliers, The 451 Group’s Fellows thinks there will also be a certain level of demand for niche supplier skills.

“Where a company has bought into an independent supplier, they will need to find talent they can bring in-house to keep the system going and extend it.

“A good example is a small company such as Data Synapse ­ its users cannot hire people quickly enough who have experience in that company,” he says. “These independent suppliers create their own ecosystem and job market. People with such dedicated skills will remain in short supply.”

Butler Group’s Rodger, however, thinks datacentre specialists will be catering for a disappearing market. He says the trend towards consolidation is not just about the number of servers or types of storage businesses have, but also the number of technologies and suppliers they use.

“There is increasing pressure to standardise, because who wants to deal with a technology that is number five or 10 in the market and does not have a hope of being in the top three in three to five years? The same applies to esoteric server skills,” says Rodger.

But what of the predicted plug-and-play future, where organisations buy computing power, bandwidth and storage as and when they need it? Rodger says utility computing ­ the generic name for such an approach ­ was anticipated five years ago, and it is still on its way now.

“Back then, I would not have said it would be prevalent in five years, and cannot say that now either. I believe software as a service is seen as a greater opportunity than datacentre as a service, although one day it will probably come,” he says. “Outsourcing is another matter entirely, although we will probably see more partial outsourcing rather than wholesale adoption.”

Next week: the final part of our definitive guide to datacentres looks at the analysts’ perspective on datacentre change

Top datacentre skills during the next three years

Virtualisation project management

Alan Rodger, research analyst at Butler Group, believes virtualisation will be the number one in-demand skill in the datacentre over the next three years, but for many organisations just setting out on the journey, a crucial initial skill to have in place is effective project management.

“You need to employ a process-driven approach, to first understand what you are running with at the moment,” says Rodger. “Because if you have a mess and start making it a mess you will not get very far. If you want to get to a better end point, you need to understand fully where you are at the beginning.”

Virtualisation skills

As well as a general understanding of virtualisation, datacentres will require specific skills in the technologies they choose. For the most part, Rodger believes popular specialisms will include VMware and Windows Server 2008, along with open source alternatives such as Xen.

“In terms of technical skills, an understanding of management-level hypervisor software is probably key,” he says.

Asset consolidation and management

While virtualisation can help you consolidate your servers, it is not the only component of a consolidation exercise. “There are also your other assets – networks, for example. Are you buying twice as much bandwidth as you need?” says Rodger.

Organisations will need the skills to understand their existing assets and to consolidate and manage their resources effectively, probably in hand with some sort of discovery and management software, he says.

IT service management skills

Rodger says the business context for your infrastructure at a management level is vitally important, and has to inform overall operations.

“In terms of skills, that probably means ensuring you can implement IT infrastructure library (ITIL) or a similar methodology and that all IT staff, including those in the datacentre, have an understanding of how that affects the way they operate and interact,” he says.

“While that might not mean taking on ITIL experts in the datacentre itself, there will be a demand for ITIL training here.”

Supplier management

As organisations increasingly choose and are given greater options to outsource particular elements of their datacentre, they will also need the in-house skills to be able to manage and deal with multiple external providers. This will ensure that all elements are integrated into a seamless IT service for the business.

Rodger thinks we will see more partial outsourcing because such management will allow firms to retain greater control in-house, while still concentrating on core activities.

“For example, there is a big increase in the market success of remote infrastructure management,” he says.

Which types of organisation will need datacentre skills?

Demand for datacentre skills will vary according to the type and size of the organisation that requires them.

Many of the big banks and financial institutions have already completed, or are a long way down the road towards, datacentre consolidation and virtualisation. The emphasis here will be on ensuring firms have the in-house skills in place to operate slimmed-down datacentres and to provide the business with flexibility going forward.

Other very large organisations in sectors as diverse as retail, government, academia and utilities are also ahead of the curve, generally because the huge size of their datacentres translates to significant improvements in efficiency and reductions in cost.

But Butler Group’s Alan Rodger thinks the case for virtualisation will become equally compelling for an ever-widening range of organisations, as the technology decreases in price and the business benefits become undeniable. Microsoft Server 2008, for example, has built-in virtualisation capabilities.

“Microsoft has majored on making virtualisation affordable and easy and it is looking for a market grab – obviously that sort of competition will bring down prices and make it more accessible across the board,” says Rodger.

Such accessibility will lead to high demand for virtualisation skills, and it will need to be appropriately provisioned through training and recruitment.

The situation is likely to be compounded by the need to go green. Large organisations, or firms whose energy use is particularly intensive such as airlines and heavy manufacturing, will face increasing regulatory measures to reduce their carbon footprints.

Other companies will wish to go green for ethical reasons, or to avoid customer approbation and reputational damage. Virtualising the datacentre is one way to make significant resource and cost reductions, while at the same time improving business efficiency. Such demands mean more organisations across diverse sectors will be seeking virtualisation skills.