Wed, October 15, 2008 — Computerworld — Gartner Inc. has ranked virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious" ability to virtualize servers, but for its increasing capability to virtualize just about everything else in a data center.

Much of what's on this annual list, released at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo here, is familiar from last year. But Gartner has tweaked the rankings as it looked at the progress of these technologies, and weighed its client and research feedback. The technologies on the list have the "potential to be disruptive to your environment or market in some way," said Gartner analyst David Cearley.

Here's Gartner's list for 2009:

1. Virtualization. (Ranked No. 5 last year.) In forecasting the impact of the economy on IT spending, Gartner put virtualization near the top of must-have technologies. But to make the strategic technology list, it had to have other characteristics as well, namely a Swiss Army Knife-like capability to be applied beyond servers.

Gartner analyst Carl Claunch said that in storage, for instance, virtualization allows users to "to combine different kinds and generations of storage technology." That gives them the freedom to mix and match storage technologies based on competitive bids, he said.

2. Cloud computing. (New to the list.) If there was a technology hype list, cloud computing would have been the top choice, said Cearley. He got some audience chuckles with this line: "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that's talking about cloud computing these days."

But Gartner sees cloud computing as having a massive game-changing role, not only as the platform for software as a service, but as a computing and storage infrastructure provider, as well as a platform for information and business processes.

3. Computing fabrics. (No. 8 last year.) Server technology is evolving to a point where you buy the physical resource you need, whether that is memory, I/O or processor, and fashion them together to create resource pools. A computing fabric "combines those [resources] as you need them," said Claunch. IT shops will, potentially, be able to dispense with their separate pools of small, medium and large servers under this model. Blade servers have some of this capability -- the ability to move memory and processor capability -- but it's limited to what's inside the chassis, he said.