Today’s data centers are being built at the forefront of industry standards. Within the past five years, the way we construct data centers has changed dramatically. David Cappuccio, the Chief of Infrastructure Research at Gartner, told CIO that “Data centers will no longer be constrained by one specific site. Instead, organizations will have multiple sites, connected by high performance networks, with the ability to move workloads to where it's less risky and more secure for the business.”
This new breed of data centers presents some inherit advantages for organizations that wish to become early adopters. Not every organization will have the budget or regulatory authority to adopt the latest data center technologies. Regardless of your unique circumstances, it pays off to be proficient in the industry’s latest trends. Highlighting the data center trends for 2014 and beyond will help you begin to formulate strategies and appropriately plan for the future computational and storage needs of your organization.
Changes in Data Storage Methodology
Data centers of the future are expected to adopt SSD hard drives. Solid state drives have permeated both private and public data center facilities at an increasing rate. Gartner research predicts that SSDs will be in 90% of data centers by 2017. That figure is impressive compared with the fact that only 20% of data centers featured SSDs in 2012. The price of solid state storage is quickly becoming on par with traditional hard disks. Although solid state drives expected to be in most data centers by the end the decade, SSD hard disks are expected to make traditional hard drives obsolete anytime soon.
Trends in Data Center Efficiency
Newly built data centers are at the cutting edge of energy efficiency standards. Hyper scalable software defined data centers are expected to further increase data center efficiency. There are reports that startups such as NIMBOXX have been formed around the very principle of rethinking the way we do data centers. While the concept of hyper scalable data centers seems somewhat far fetched, the rapid maturation of cloud services suggests that data centers are only becoming more agile and less dependent upon human intervention in order to function autonomously.
Data centers are sprouting up in some of the most obscure places in order to serve some of the most incredible purposes. As data center technology continues to get smaller, faster and more efficient, businesses alongside development teams all the way down to those at the consumer level stand to benefit.
