The forecast for data centres includes:

• Increased IT demand
  • By 2013, there will be 82 million servers installed.
  • 20 per cent of server workloads have been virtualized.
  • Storage will increase by 650 per cent by 2012.
  • Less than 30 per cent of disk storage is used effectively.
• More cost pressures
  • 75 per cent of CIOs anticipate a strongly centralized infrastructure in five years.
  • IT spending is forecast to increase only 2-3 per cent.
• Need for flexibility
  • 70 cents of every dollar is spent on maintaining existing environment.
  • 71 per cent of data centres are more than seven years old.
  • 5-60 per cent of IT workloads may be cloud-enabled

Extending the life of your data centre assets can help enable you to defer significant capital expenditures on new IT technology or additional data centre capacity. According to industry estimates, more than 80 million servers will be installed in the next few years; distributed server utilization is less than 15 per cent; and virtualization maturity is at 20 to 30 per cent. So, there is a lot of opportunity to improve asset utilization. Operating a smarter data centre can enable you to double IT capacity or reduce operational expenses by up to 50 per cent.

• What Jeopardy! win means to you

  As Jeopardy! winner, IBM's highly optimized Watson computing system represents an advance for solving the kinds of problems that are emerging in business. The computing power of Watson can be compared to over 2,800 computers with a single processor core, linked together in a super high-speed network.

  Achieve "Watson-like" efficiency using IBM Server Optimization and Integration Services. Based on virtualization analytics, IBM can help you tackle more complex workloads with up to 50 per cent reduced costs and 6-18 month virtualization ROI. Five hundred gigabytes of disk hold all the information Watson needs to compete on Jeopardy! This data size is equivalent to about 200 million printed pages.

IBM services for extending the life of your data centre

IBM Server Optimization and Integration Services can help enable you to create a computing environment that optimizes performance by reducing IT infrastructure complexity, controlling management costs and increasing adaptability.

IBM Storage Optimization and Integration Services – and our methods, tools and software – have been designed and developed around a holistic "full life cycle" understanding of what it takes to deliver enterprise storage solutions.

IBM Networking Strategy and Optimization Services offer strategy, assessment and optimization services to help identify where you can make improvements, recommend actions for improvements and implement those recommendations.