Will 2012 be a pivotal year for the Internet much like the late 1990’s was? Carolyn Duffy Marsan takes a look at the five major changes facing the Internet in 2012 for Network World.

This year, Internet Protocol will upgrade to version 6 – marking the Internet’s biggest technical upgrade ever. Also, key Internet contracts held by the US federal government are open for bid. Below are five Internet operations that will or may see significant change:

1. Root servers may have a new operator. ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has overseen the operation of the Internet root servers since 1998. ICANN’s contract expires in March 2012
2. A new operator for the .com registry. Verisign has operated the .com domain since 1999. Verisign’s contract is also set to expire.
3. New top-level domains. In January, ICANN plans to introduce up to 1,000 new top-level domains.
4. More websites will support IPv6. The U.S. federal government has a mandate to support IPv6 on all of their public-facing websites by September 2012 which could drive further IPv6 deployment in the US.
5. Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses in 2012. This again puts more pressure on carriers and enterprises to move to IPv6.

Gregory Machler of CSO reports for Network World that a growing trend in disaster recovery for cloud providers is the use of load-balanced data centers instead of hot-cold data centers. A load-balanced data center replaces the data base suffering from a disaster with a similar data center that operates at a reduced capacity.

A challenge when using load-based data centers for disaster recovery in cloud computing is tracking configurations of the infrastructure of an application. Why? Each application creates multiple elements within their environment such as server names, open IP addresses, DNS mappings, firewall rules, SAN and NAS configurations and database clusters just to name a few. Also, not only does an application create these elements but each element can exist for different environments such as production, test and development.
How to mitigate this challenge? Centralization of infrastructure configuration metadata. Centralized parameters and versioning of applications can decrease problems within the load-balanced data center and help to return the data center back to a stable state when disaster or errors have occurred.

What do you think will be the top IT trends for 2012? Gartner reports its top 10 trends for 2012 in a recent Network World article.

1. Evolution of virtualization: virtualization will drive more companies to treat IT like a business.
2. Big data: unstructured data is predicted to grow 80% over the next five years. Technologies that get the most efficient usage patterns per kilowatt and higher-end performance optimization will increase in importance.
3. Energy efficiency: IT will need to inventory what compute resources are doing to reduce and optimization power consumption
4. Context aware apps: context-based computing will go beyond the business intelligence applications and will bring data together from social networks and mobile devices.
5. IT Staff: staff retention and retraining become a significant issue as baby boomers continue to retire.
6. Social networks: ignoring social networking is no longer an option for companies.
7. Consumerization: new applications will be developed to address mobile users, companies need a well-defined strategy to take advantage of this development.
8. Compute per Square foot: virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers which can result in better server performance yielding to savings in floor space and energy.
9. Cloud computing: the possibilities for organizations to benefit from cloud computing will continue to increase.
10. Fabrics: further infrastructure convergence to optimize shared data center resources efficiently and dynamically.

Ellen Messer from Network World reports for 2012 “Security Minefield: ‘Bring your own device’ will bedevil IT security in 2012”. MDM or mobile device management could be your hottest acronym in 2012. As the adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices continues rapidly, the need for enterprise IT to make decisions regarding the protection of these devices is becoming even more important. Combine that with the increase in malware threats for mobile devices and many enterprises’ allowance for employees to use their personal smartphones and tablets for business purposes, or “bring your own device”, and IT will have their hands full in the coming year.

On top of new mobile device management needs and the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) trend, IT is likely to have to face the security consequences of their own virtualized networks and cloud-based services. Experts says that standard security controls such as data-loss prevention, anti-malware, encryption and intrusion prevention should not been forgotten. In fact, the need for regular assessments of how security vendors or cloud services support virtualized-oriented security is increasingly important.

Businesses that want to take advantage of Cloud Computing can learn from some of the common mistakes made by others, says Nancy Gohring in her Network World article.

Pitfall #1 – Failing to set up redundancies for disaster scenarios
Don’t assume that a cloud server is backed up somewhere else. You still need to make sure you’re backing up and will need a redundancy plan in place. Researchers at Forrester call this “the uneven handshake” between what the services cloud providers offer and the responsibilities left to the customer. Cloud services typically do not take care of security, application availability, backup and recovery, and service performance.

Pitfall #2 – Not accommodating for data center failures
Companies should ensure that their systems are load balanced and that workloads shift to different zones in the event of an outage.

Pitfall #3 – Failing to accommodate for potential bandwidth issues
App performance is coming to the forefront. Companies are beginning to look harder at the ability of the cloud to support business critical elements and achieve desired latency. A couple of years ago, companies were implementing centralized cloud deployments, trying to pack as many servers and storage devices as possible into a small set of data centers. Now, with increasing focus on app performance, companies are starting to shift to distributed platforms where they can run applications on infrastructure closer to end users in order to improve performance. Poor app performance is driving some businesses to switch from public clouds to private clouds.

As companies continue to search out ways to cut data center costs, low-power processors are getting more looks and could bring a fundamental change in server architecture reports Agam Shah from Network World.

Analysts predict that low-power processors could be in full use in data centers by 2013 and if mixed with graphic chips, companies could see massive performance improvements and power savings. Power efficiency continues to be a top determining factor in server purchases. 2011 saw an increase in the build-out of cloud and high performance servers around the hyperscale model – servers are densely packed to cut power consumption. Analyst say as companies look for more power savings and continue to place more importance on performance-per-watt, they may consider low-power processors which are used, today, mostly in tablets and smartphones.

That said, there are still barriers to moving to a full low-power processing world. For example, transaction type, current processors are much more effective in handling data-intensive tasks than low-power processors. Also, current, low-power processors only support 32-but addressing and have limited correction features. Currently, some organizations are experimenting with the technology making it an interesting one to watch in 2012.

According to Network World’s Carolyn Duffy Marsan, IT staff retention is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing CIOs in 2012.

Three trends are contributing to this situation:

1. Corporate IT hiring is on the rise, tempting IT professionals with higher pay and opportunities for advancement.
2. Younger techies change jobs frequently, averaging only a year or two in a position before switching.
3. Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age.

CIOs are seeing a significant amount of turnover among Java developers in particular, who are staying with a company for an average of one year or less. A lack of experienced resources is having an impact on companies as they are unable to meet some of their growth objectives that rely on having a core team of experienced staff in place. With the number of IT job opportunities set to remain plentiful in 2012, staff turnover will remain a challenge for CIOs.

Lily Mok, research vice president at Gartner, says CIOs need to evaluate their staff and figure out which personnel are critical to the IT department’s success because of their skills and experience and make sure those people feel valued. “You need to know who is leaving and why they are leaving,” Mok says. “Even if you have 1% turnover, that might be too much if these 1% are in critical roles and have critical skills.”

In a December survey of 1,200 IT hiring managers, Dice.com found that 65% will add IT professionals in the first half of 2012. Dice.com also reported IT shortages in many states, including California, New Jersey, Texas and New York.

Mok recommends that CIOs compile a workforce plan two or three years into the future, including the most critical roles, the demographics of the people in those roles, and the risk to the organization if those people leave. She says CIOs should make an effort to have Baby Boomers transfer their knowledge to younger staff before they retire.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

Even though conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosby, sees it differently. Tim Greene’s interview with Crosby is the basis of his article “Godfather of Xen: Virtualization holds a key to public-cloud security” on Network World.

A fundamental characteristic of virtualization is isolation, the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context. It can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the open source hypervisor and a founder of startup Bromium, which uses Xen features.

Isolating processes more finely can boost security in public cloud environments, he says. “I think one will be to create a highly secure cloud system which can be used to deliver multilevel secure systems,” he says.

If he’s right, public clouds will become more secure and businesses will be more likely to trust them. The need for private and hybrid clouds, along with their costs, will disappear.

In 2011, six vendors dominated disk storage with more than 80% of the market share.  Here are some of the highlights from the last year according to Network Computing’s Steve Wexler (“Disk-y Business“).

• According to Gartner, users are still buying the best-of-breed products from NetApp and EMC, and not from the server vendors like IBM and HP.
• EMC grew its external disk revenue share from 3% in 2010 to 28%  in 2911.  EMC also made its biggest product launch in its history with 41 new products.
• One of the big stories in 2011 was Dell’s ongoing move away from being a storage reseller (EMC) to being a storage innovator, largely through acquisitions (such as EqualLogic, Compellent, Ocarina and Exanet). Dell also actively pursued long-term profitability by expanding its own portfolio of storage solutions, which generated a 15% revenue increase in 2011.
• Both Cisco and Brocade trended downwards in purchases for 2011. Symantec and Commvault also faced challenges, and HP was another vendor that “raised concerns”.
• HP announced an entry-level SMB storage appliance in June, which supports the VMWare API for Array Integration, as well as the vCenter manager for server virtualization.  HP also announced a number of new products, including the HP EVA P6000 storage appliance, the HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, the V400 and V800, which were optimized to run in IT-as-a-service environments.

In 2011, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could attribute its success to the lagging economy.  “Cloud storage systems and services helped users deal with the uncertain economics of 2011 by letting them fund that growth using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one’s own data center,” says Sharon Fisher in her Network Computing article.

The growth in demand for storage has been huge.  According to Aberdeen Group, 15% of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80% and 100% annually.  And it’s not just organizations that need cloud storage.  With digital media files so large in size, consumers are also looking for an online repository for their personal media.  This year we’ve seen a variety of cloud service offerings emerge targeting anywhere from the consumer to the large organization.

From a business standpoint, organizations are seeing benefit from cloud storage in a number of ways – to relieve the pressure of escalating IT infrastructure costs and as an effective alternative for disaster recovery.

According to Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm, “SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011.”  This is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2015.