Trend #1: Disaster prevention
Key strategies such as business continuity and disaster prevention are expected to gain significant importance in the future. Many organizations have a strong awareness of possible failures both in terms of man-made and natural disasters.
Trend #2: Shift to Internet data centers
In 2015, organizations across the globe will be shifting from captive data centers to Internet data centers (third-party data centers). This is mainly due to the fact that services from Internet data centers require no capital investment, but deliver high operational efficiency and scalable infrastructure.
The increased complexity in IT infrastructure leads to a major challenge for many captive data centers to manage the power and cooling requirements as most of captive data centers operate on old DC equipment. These types of technology upgrades and investments in technology for the future can be concerns in captive data centers. Whereas, third party data centers (Internet data centers) are supplied with the most recent technology upgrades and are managed well.
Trend #3: SDN and virtualization
Over the years, data centers experienced significant changes due to the emergence of software-defined servers (also defined as virtualization), software-defined storage, and software-defined networking. In the software defined world, the physical infrastructure with software consideration is to decouple the computing control with the actual infrastructure so that computing can be brought together on demand from available components. It helps the users in scaling, provisioning, managing, and deconstructing traditional computing systems.
Trend #4: Density and heat
Increasing computing power and speeds is usually measured as density in data centers. There has been a significant increase in data center density over the past decade. This is due to the high memory capacity, processors, and the next generation of gigabit Ethernet (GbE). These things have increased density and heat that must be addressed to increase the performance of these data centers.
Trend #5: Big data
Key business decisions depend on accurate and appropriate data and data centers must rise to that challenge. Analyzing big data has become vital to data centers. In fact, big data, along with computing and storage needs, is expected to drive the network infrastructure and storage hardware in upcoming years.
Trend #6: Internet of things
The biggest disruption to data centers will be the Internet of Things (IoT). The proliferation of sensor devices sending data by cloud and then being analyzed in real time via data analytics is certainly changing the way data centers will be optimized in the future.
The above disruptive trends and emerging technologies are reshaping every inch of the data center. However, going forward, the importance and spending patterns in data centers are expected to increase significantly. We also believe most of the data centers across the globe will be managed by expert data center providers or will be completely outsourced to third party data centers. This will be due to the increasing adoption of outsourcing services by enterprises that allows them to focus more on their core business areas.
