What does the future hold for the ever- evolving Data Centers

Upcoming data center infrastructure investments will have to focus heavily on client-facing and analytical workloads that enhance an organization’s competitive advantage in the industry.

By Rakesh Kumar Singh

Creaking under the strain of the tremendous bandwidth and workload demands by the applications and resources required for today’s IT infrastructure, the challenge for businesses is their ability to address the technological evolution and their agility to react and innovate fast enough to close the innovation gaps, while constantly remaining competitive in the marketplace.

What this also means, is that the evolution of the data center is similarly highly critical in the evolution of organizations themselves, and their abilities to operate and expand.

DATA CENTERS: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Data centers have existed in one form or the other since the late 1950s, with a characteristic role to store data that is crucial to a particular operation or task. However in the last few years, not only has the role of the data center grown substantially, demand from user insights and expectations have changed to a certain extent as well.

The IDC FutureScape study 2016 highlights changing data center priorities based on use case scenarios. And this is forcing businesses to re-consider their IT investment priories when it comes to data centers and their operational models.

The study predicts that by 2018, 50% of new data center infrastructure investments will be for systems of engagement, insight, and action rather than the maintenance of existing systems; while 45% of companies will rely on highly instrumented data centers that employ advanced automation to increase efficiency and reduce the operational costs involved, while still providing for agile scalability for years to come.

It is imperative that the data center – and its underlying infrastructure, must keep pace with market demand.

STAYING RELEVANT – NEW ARCHITECTURAL APPROACHES

With an ever increasing number of devices that are active on networks and the increase in data movement across networks, the need for truly ‘smart’ data centers have never been higher. The growth in terms of scale for organizations and its networks have placed higher demands which data centers need to catch up to.

In today’s digitized world with its exponentially growing, vibrant online ecosystem, it is of crucial importance that data centers meet industry demand, and constantly redefine and outperform itself to stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive. For organizations, the data center becomes a resource of immense significance, and an asset that can drive growth for the organization.

With technology evolving by the day, the data center too is expected to have its fair share of change in the coming years. For enterprises that have already invested in data centers and in its underlying infrastructure, the coming years will see changes in terms of the realignment of its workload capacity and priority, obsolescence of certain operational models, diversification of IT and a shift towards smarter automated data center facilities.

WHAT LIES AHEAD?

In terms of workload realignment in data centers, the study also highlights a key shift in the coming years of almost 50% towards greater investment into creating repositories that enables engagement and insight over the conventional storage function. Upcoming data center infrastructure investments will have to focus heavily on client-facing and analytical workloads that enhance an organization’s competitive advantage in the industry.

Most businesses today have recognized the critical role data centers play in the organization. However, even with many businesses already having made significant investments in existing data center facilities, most such facilities have been designed to support 2nd Platform environments and are becoming unsuitable for 3rd Platform environments.

It is expected, that by the end of 2018, almost 40% of organizations that have already made investments will have to confront facilities and infrastructure mismatches. This includes incompatibility in terms of power, cooling, network connectivity, and the security required to support the new data center landscape as traditional systems continue to be virtualized or shifted entirely to the cloud.

To this end, it is important for organizations to consider a unified approach to manage the data center, whether it is through options such as virtualization, automation or software-defined infrastructure – in order to deliver the necessary systems of engagement required today for the ability to remain competitive in the long run.

EMBRACING THE INSTANT EVOLUTION

Data centers have long established its presence in many organizations as a technological and operational backbone, however at the core of a data center remains a strategically important asset – the network, which is increasingly seeing its functions converge especially as a result of the rise of software-defined infrastructure.

Current operational models are rapidly being realigned, with the integration of functions such as building management and information management systems. Today’s smarter data centers are also likely to incorporate the likes of servers, storage, racks, power systems and other networking equipment all within a converged network framework, as businesses look towards software-defined infrastructure to allow IT to break down barriers and orchestrate resources across the entire data center.

In light of these developments, it is paramount that the right investment path for your data centers and their underlying infrastructure is selected, due to the tremendous impact not just on your operational capacity, but also on future growth.

The coming years are likely to bring even further significant shifts and change to the data center landscape, as it evolves to meet growing demand.

– The author is Tech Lead of Datacenter Technologies at Juniper Networks.