Burton Group today launched a new service that provides practical advice for IT professionals facing critical data center decisions. The new Data Center Strategies (DCS) research will help IT professionals leverage existing and emerging technologies to solve critical data center issues including server sprawl, skyrocketing power and space costs, storage and regulatory data retention, data center systems management, and disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

According to Jamie Lewis, Burton Group CEO and research chair, technological advances in the data center, such as server and storage virtualization, storage networking using iSCSI and blade systems, multi-core processors, and low power platforms present opportunities to build efficient and productive data centers while reducing costs.

Burton Group has assembled a team of highly respected industry analysts with a deep understanding of data center technologies.

• Drue Reeves, VP and research director: Over 15 years of experience in the hardware and operating systems industry for Compaq, and Dell. Winner of the 2006 SNIA Storage Industry Impact Award:
• Richard Jones, VP and service director: Over 22 years of software engineering, project and product management for Novell’s storage, high availability and business continuity technologies, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and NetWare operating systems.
• Chris Wolf, senior analyst: Over 14 years of experience in virtualization, data protection and recovery, high availability, and enterprise storage management. Authored Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise, the first book published on the topic.
• Nik Simpson, analyst: Over 20 years of industry experience in storage, enterprise servers, and systems software. Formerly co-chair of SNIA’s Information Lifecycle Management Initiative (ILMI). Co-authored SNIA Technical Tutorial: Storage Virtualization.
• Andrew Kutz, analyst: Over 11 years of data center systems administration experience. Featured TechTarget author covering virtualization technologies. Founding member of the Austin VMware Users' Group (VMUG).

Technology topics to be covered include:

• Virtualization: When to, and types of virtualization; Physical to virtual migration; Backup and recovery of virtualized environments
• Storage: IP (iSCSI) and fiber channel SANs; Data Protection, backup and restoration of data; Data classification/ILM and storage virtualization
• Compute: Open systems architecture, products and components; High availability and clustering; Blade servers and small form factors; High performance computing, grids
• Operations and Management: Disaster recovery and business continuity; Data center power and cooling; Data center systems and device management; Data management
• Additional Areas of Focus for 2007: Industry Standard Server Hardware including Blade Servers; Emerging disk technologies; Storage Arrays, JBODs, NAS appliances; Data Center Management Standards; CPU technology; Data Center Physical Security; Client Virtualization

Burton Group is offering a complimentary research report titled, "Let's Get Virtual: A Look at Today’s Server Virtualization Architectures". One-time registration required for access to free research at the Burton Group website.

Editor's note: I am updating Burton Group listings at Analyst Profiles this evening. -BF

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