Looking Ahead: Data Centers of 2018 and Beyond
The driverless economy, augmented and virtual reality, new methods of driving customer-centric engagement, and the overall business mandate toward digital transformation has placed a tremendous burden on IT organizations and their systems and data centers. Demands for data are growing exponentially, making IT environments even more critical, hybrid and distributed than ever before. As a result, data management itself has become increasingly complex as operators now support a multitude of deployment sites – from on-premises and cloud to colocation and edge applications.
Although the variety of new trends impacting the data center market has been broad, arguably the most impactful has been the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT has created a more connected world than ever before and has vastly increased the volume of machine data. The continued growth of the IoT, the rising volume of digital traffic, and the increasing adoption of cloud-based applications are key technology trends that are shaping the landscape of data centers.
Data centers have become increasingly distributed, and the data management requirements more complex; coupled with reduced budgets and fewer staff, this can create a perfect storm of management challenges. In fact, 59 percent of IT budgets are unchanged, and 16 percent are decreasing, according to Gartner. What’s more, hybrid environments mean that IT teams no longer have the holistic view they once had with a single on-premises data center. Frustrations include decreased visibility to assets, inability to compare performance, and timely or costly deployment.
In earlier generations, data centers were entirely on-premises. Many data center managers leveraged traditional data center infrastructure management (DCIM) to gain an understanding and provide analyses of IT ecosystems’ health. DCIM has played a hugely positive role in bringing much-needed improvements to the way data centers are being managed in the digital age- from optimizing facilities, and implementing customer feedback - DCIM is extremely valuable. However, with a more distributed ecosystem, standard DCIM would need to be deployed in each individual data center site used by an organization, rendering it too costly, timely and inefficient.
Read More – DataCenter Knowledge |
