An IT consulting firm went around the floor of the recent InterOp show in New York, asking 100 IT professionals to rank their most urgent priorities. The resulting survey showed that they are mlost focused on supporting new technologies and innovations, followed by cost containment. Cost containment, by the way, rose from 11 percent considering this a priority a year ago to 21 percent this year.

Still popular, but not quite as popular as a year ago, is virtualization. There was almost no concern about two big items seen in the trade press and analyst reports — cloud computing and ITIL.

We do a lot of this type of work here at Unisphere Research, constantly polling members of users groups on what’s top of mind.  Interestingly, different groups yield different assortments of priorities.

Our most recent trend snapshot was among members of the International DB2 Users Group, which tend to represent large IBM shops. Among these professionals and managers, the top priority for the coming year, far and away, is managing explosive data growth, cited by 40 percent.  Meeting compliance initiatives come in second with 27 percent, followed by managing business intelligence initiatives at 21 percent.

What emerges from these surveys is a picture of IT and data managers needing to deliver more and more to their organizations on limited budgets. The push is on to get smarter and more innovative with solutions that can do far more with a lot less.

At this week’s VMworld, VMware unvieled something called its “Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS).”

According to VMWare, the Virtual Datacenter OS enables users to “efficiently pool all types of hardware resources – servers, storage and network – into an aggregated on-premise cloud – and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.”

VMWare added that “datacenters running on the Virtual Datacenter OS are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. With the Virtual Datacenter OS from VMware, businesses large and small can benefit from the flexibility and the efficiency of the ‘lights-out’ datacenter.”

Sounds good, but what exactly does VMWare’s VD-OS bring that isn’t available from your traditional OS, be it Linux, Windows, or z/OS?  Don’t all the OSes have the mission of abstracting hardware and system resources into an aggregated service layer (”on-premise cloud”)?  Is VD-OS intended to sit on top of the multitude of OSes that may exist across an enterprise, or outright replace those OSes? As pointed out by Mary-Jo Foley, Some say VD-OS is a direct competitor to Microsoft Windows 2008 Server. However, Microsoft may be going after different types of clouds.

There’s certainly a good case that can be made for virtualization — both from a business and IT management sense. But it’s unclear what a virtual OS can bring to the table, othe than more confusion.

VMWare appears to be targeting environments that already have been vortualized to some extent. In a related post, Scott Lowe brings some clarity to the purpose of VD-OS, noting that “what VMware is working on is an OS for the virtual datacenter, not a virtual OS for the datacenter. The distinction is important. VDC-OS isn’t intended to be an OS for all aspects of the datacenter. It’s intended to be an OS for all aspects of the virtual datacenter.”

Dion Hinchcliffe, the leading proponent of Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), recently posted details about Amazon’s new Elastic Block Store (EBS), a cloud-based computing platform that ostensibly is targeted at fulfilling the roles of enteprise-class data centers.

While Amazon Web Services’ previous offerings — including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for processing and message queuing, S3 for storage, and SimpleDB as a cloud database — enabled organizations to move functions out to the clouds, their capacity was limited, Dion observes. However, he adds, EBS “now makes it possible to have dozens, and potentially hundreds, of terabytes of readily-accessible persistent network storage in a traditional format of choice, particularly relational databases, all at commodity prices.”

Is this the direction of enterprise data centers? Will we see more of the nuts-and-bolts work and maintenance handled in the cloud? Some observers say yes.  Dion quotes Jeff Schneider, CEO of SOA firm MomentumSI, who stated that “we might just be ready to declare the ‘time of death’ for the enterprise data center.”

Dion said that it’s too soon to write off onsite data centers, and it may take at least two to five years before we start seeing wholesale movement of data centers to the cloud. “Enterprises are notoriously slow moving and risk averse when it comes to major IT changes,” he says, adding that “there will be a great deal of early skepticism from many quarters about such a strategic shifts, some of which will be valid and much of which will not be.”

He adds, however, that “it’s fairly clear that the classical multi-hundred thousand square foot proprietary data center is a dinosaur of another age, like mainframes are for most organizations today.”

It’s way too soon to declare the data center dead, a dinosaur, or even an anachronism. If anything, there has been an expansion of data centers in recent years, as organizations have increased their online capabilities.  In addition, organizations have made enormous investments in their legacy and Web infrastructures, and are not ready to throw it all out.

The mainframe-as-dinosaur analogy is not only a tired one, but also not the case, IBM has reported record sales of its System i series, which are geared to support the latest workloads, from open source to SOA.

Cloud computing has clearly become an important option for companies seeking low-cost processing power and application functionality. As Dion remarks, “the relentless forces of commoditization and competition are having their say as well and cloud computing offers up very substantial bottom-line returns. Throw in an economic downturn and a round of enterprise cost-cutting and the market and cloud computing seem ready to meet.”

The time has come for cloud computing, but its going to take time. Remember, there’s been a lot of outsourcing in the traditional sense as well — EDS and IBM Global Services have more than their share of data centers. Don’t close up that data center anytime soon.