The days of buying servers based on speeds and feeds alone are fast fading away. The changing dynamics of the datacenter are driving customers towards new criteria in selecting the products and, indeed, vendors. The rising complexity and cost are two key challenges most enterprises are grappling with, and they are looking for architectural and software breakthroughs to help them build a more dynamic IT fabric.

The availability of faster processors, more capacity and denser architectures at relatively lesser cost, have led to an escalation in densities inside the datacenter. This is because enterprises have, over the years, found it easier to add more servers and storage to maintain availability and scale. However, it is evident to them now that this has led to the various disadvantages.

IDC's latest Asia/Pacific survey of over 2,000 respondents across 14 countries identified "investing in better management/automation tools to reduce cost and improve efficiency" and "consolidation/virtualization to create space, improve utilization and reduce spend" as the top 2 most prominent priorities with respect to the datacenter.