Sean Derrington

Through 2003/04, infrastructure consolidation will be driven by value-based portfolio management, but remain impaired by non-linear server pricing, immature tools, service-level priorities, chargeback, and organizational politics. Physical co-location and networked storage consolidation will be widespread during 2002/03. Premium high-end server pricing, coupled with immature partitioning and workload management, will hinder higher-level OS, DBMS, and application server consolidation for Unix (until 2003/04) and Windows (until 2005/06).

Implementing policy-based storage services requires an understanding of the architectures, directions, and implications of both storage-area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS), which will significantly morph through to 2006.