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Discover the Future of IT Infrastructure at Gartner’s Las Vegas Conference
This year’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference will explore how leaders can drive innovation in AI, cloud, and data center ops.
Drew Robb
December 2, 2024
7 Min Read
The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference takes place in Las Vegas on December 10-12Image: Gartner
The pace of change in the IT arena in recent years has been staggering. Advances in the cloud, containerization, AI, GPUs, and liquid cooling, to name a few, have been so rapid that it can be hard to keep up.
“Data centers are experiencing significant transformations driven by AI, sustainability, infrastructure platform engineering and automation,” said Gartner analyst Tony Harvey, who will be speaking during this year’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas on December 10-12.
During the show, Harvey will highlight two key areas of infrastructure: power and cooling. Power, he says, is the one factor that will either drive the implementation of emerging technologies in the data center industry or will inhibit their implementation.
IT managers need to pay attention to how their data centers will be able to access enough power to run AI and other high-performance systems. That means finding reliable power sources, using energy efficiently so that most of it is challenged to compute, storage, and networking rather cooling and building systems.
Harvey advocates on-site power generation to back up the grid which he believes will increasingly become unstable due to increasing demand and the market switching to renewables.
As well as power infrastructure, Harvey will also call attention to the importance of upgrading the data centers cooling infrastructure.
“We can build a 50 kW rack and cool it with air but the dirty little secret about that rack is that 10-20kW is just being used to spin fans to move the air thought the server,” said Harvey. “With AI server racks now getting past 100 kW, air is no longer sufficient which is driving us to liquid cooling.”
His advice is not to wait until rack density reaches a high level before implementing liquid cooling. An 800 W coolant distribution unit (CDU) can cool two 40 kW racks, which frees up energy that can be used for compute.
Setting the Stage for AI Transformation
Generative AI is changing almost every aspect of IT and business. Balancing value against resilience and risk is critical to success as organizations attempt to transform by adopting the right technologies and platforms. Visionary leaders are needed who can tackle these challenges and to build the teams and technologies that keep delivering a prosperous future.
The Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 is where tomorrow’s leaders are made. The event brings together top analysts from Gartner as well as technology leaders from successful enterprises.
Attendees will gain must-have insights, strategies and frameworks for infrastructure and operations leaders to enable them to think big and drive real impact within their organizations.
“Leadership is essential to build the teams and technologies to deliver next generation infrastructure and operations,” said Global Conference Chair and Gartner Analyst Daniel Betts.
“This year's conference provides visionary, strategic, and practical advice to transform the way you deliver value, navigate the constant pressure to balance costs, risks and technology, and grow your people, your organization and yourself, while networking in person with your peers.”
Training the Digital Infrastructure Leaders of Tomorrow
The conference is broken into a series of tracks that span the entire range of infrastructure and operations, including:
The Accelerating Innovation track explores ways to enable infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to empower their teams to be proactive in supporting business success through practices, trends and technologies that will drive innovation. It includes the top generative AI use cases that can bring the most I&O benefit; a strategic guide to the all-wireless enterprise; transforming the physical world with spatial computing; powering AI-native enterprises; and when should I&O leaders take a bet on an emerging technology?
The Optimizing Cloud track will help attendees find a more coherent approach to cloud innovation, modernization, governance, adoption, and migration. Sessions include: the future of the cloud; cloud cost hygiene, your first step in managing cloud costs; the metrics that drive success in cloud cost optimization; protecting and recovering cloud data; and the secrets of accurate cloud cost forecasting.
The Resilient Infrastructure track explains how I&O leaders can transform operations teams that are adopting new practices and technologies. It includes: a practical guide to reducing infrastructure technical debt; how to develop an infrastructure risk strategy; exploring distributed hybrid infrastructure on-premises, at the edge, and in the cloud; and the storage requirements needed by generative AI workloads.
The Transforming Future Operations track focuses on how I&O leaders can adopt new practices and technologies to meet their increasingly complex operational environments; building an ITSM chatbot more powerful than ChatGPT; the platform-oriented I&O operating model; how AI will be the foundation of next-generation IT operations; revolutionizing ITSM by unleashing the power of AI; and how automation can generate seamless service delivery.
The Enhancing Current Operations track offers new ways to ensure availability and resilience in delivered services, platforms, and products. It zeroes in on how I&O leaders can empower operations teams to deliver operational enhancements that support centralized, distributed, hybrid and cloud operations practices and technologies; how backup and disaster recovery can be aligned with the world of platform engineering; observability as the central nervous system for applications; build your I&O automation strategy in 30 minutes; and five steps to deliver value in AIOPS with event intelligence solutions.
The Integrating Security track covers what is needed to secure and defend organizations from exposures and threats; integrating security, recovery, and compliance best practices into day-to-day operations; a step-by-step guide to ransomware recovery; how to implement zero-trust networking; a supervillain’s guide to misusing AI; managing insider risk; and secure, backup and recovery of Active Directory from cyberthreats.
The Redefining Talent & Skills track lays out how to ensure I&O leaders have the right people with the right skills to meet current and future organization needs; attracting, retaining and elevating a multigenerational I&O workforce; building a skills pipeline for the platform engineering future; how to build a modern career path; how to upskill talent faster by fostering a culture of agile learning; and I&O skills that are needed now and in the future.
The Leading Adaptable Organizations track helps attendees to design an ongoing strategy and roadmap that works despite constantly changing business requirements, rapid technological change, multigenerational workforces, and challenging recruitment market conditions. This track provides leadership vision for 2025 in infrastructure and operations; how to do more with less using resource capacity planning; how to lead employees through the AI revolution; leadership techniques to develop product-centric I&O teams; and using storytelling to captivate and persuade your audience.
The Outcome-Driven Costs and Value track covers cost optimization, sourcing, procurement, and vendor management to maximize cost and value outcomes. Sessions include: The top 10 FinOps practices for optimizing generative AI costs; four powerful steps to ‘vendorize’ your negotiation playbook for cost savings and cost avoidance; how to leverage Gartner’s nine-step process to proactively manage software audits and tips & tactics to negotiate audit settlements; a practical guide to IT vendor performance management; and assessing the cost implications of lift-and-shift.
“Having the information that Gartner provides allows us to cut to the chase so we can focus on what we need to drive the organization forward,” said Robert England, vice president of infrastructure and operations at Selective Insurance.
Avoiding the Top Cloud Strategy Mistakes
Many organizations have no clearcut cloud strategy yet believe they are operating on one, notes David Smith, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. During the event he will outline a variety of approaches that executive leaders should follow to maximize outcomes from the cloud strategies they devise.
“Many organizations compromise the effectiveness of their cloud strategy by assuming that it concerns only IT,” said Smith. “Some believe they don’t need a cloud exit strategy because they don’t expect to bring anything back from the cloud, and those that create an exit strategy tend to focus on extricating themselves from contracts, ignoring important issues such as data ownership and egress charges.”
While Smith tackles broad cloud strategies, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman prefers to address I&O challenges at the edge. He will detail proven strategies that organizations can adopt to manage the unique challenges of edge environments effectively. His sessions are based on having talked to hundreds of enterprises about edge computing, from which he has gleaned a few essential best practices that can be summed up as: Be strategic, be architectural, be flexible, and be cooperative.
“Enterprises should plan and deploy edge computing solutions within the context of a broader business strategy,” said Bittman. “They should buy (or build) solutions with specific requirements and measurable benefits, but they should do it as part of a platform, to avoid one-off custom solutions and to accelerate future deployments.”
Register now for the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas (December 10-12, 2024).
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