How to Achieve Sustainable, Cost-Effective Growth for Your IT Infrastructure—and Your Business. Opportunity and Risk in a Time of Change. The ability to understand and manage change has long been a core competence of successful companies. In today’s global and technology-dependent business world, it is more important than ever.

---

How to Achieve Sustainable, Cost-Effective Growth for Your IT Infrastructure—and Your Business

Opportunity and Risk in a Time of Change

The ability to understand and manage change has long been a core competence of successful companies. In today’s global and technology-dependent business world, it is more important than ever. Technology is opening markets, enabling global outsourcing, and helping companies cope with complex regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Technology is also moving us toward a real-time business environment in which transactions are instantaneous, processes are transparent, and the ability to turn oceans of data into actionable information is a critical competitive advantage.

A convergence of technologies fuels these changes. A short list would include Web services, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, mobile clients and wireless networks, Voice over IP, and improved tools for business intelligence and process analysis. It is critical that companies work to understand and integrate these emerging capabilities. As they do so, they also must pay close attention to the basic health, scalability, manageability, and agility of their IT infrastructure, because fundamental server technologies are also advancing rapidly. Companies that manage these transitions effectively will be better positioned to successfully extend their technology-based business solutions. Those that don’t may be left behind in a rapidly changing competitive environment.

Today’s Critical Server Hardware Transitions

Three transitions stand out as particularly fundamental for addressing next-generation performance, capacity, and TCO challenges: multi-core processors, virtualization, and 64-bit computing (Figure 1).