The state of innovation and the resurgence of technological disruptions has reached unprecedented levels. In the coming years, there will be a high rate of change, which will see the migration from legacy systems to those of the new age. Such changes will redefine the very nature of how all aspects of technology interact with each other.
Aside from core technology, important considerations will be given to environmental and business concerns. Energy efficiency will emerge as a dominant factor in decision-making, as will increased data center density and performance.
Independence of power: Rising consumption and pressures on energy supplies from governments have translated into risks for businesses residing in large data centers. For such companies, mitigating this risk will focus on future-proofing power supplies. Large consumer companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft have already embraced and achieved partial independence in their power supplies.
Data privacy and legalities: Increased sensitivity to data security and privacy is constantly changing the dynamics of how companies store their data. The penetration of cloud-based services and advances in user behavior tracking will only fuel it. Privacy laws and regulations will now decide how and where data is stored. And this will only get murkier with the wide-scale adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its supporting infrastructure. Given this context, there is a significant chance that most companies will focus on core services and take advantage of data centers, either on-demand or with colocation providers.
Decentralized and edge-centric implementations: The growing demand for services will require data centers to be ‘closer to consumption’. This will help nurture new age services such as streaming, IoT, and more. Such an implementation will help reduce latency, increase connectivity and bandwidth availability.
Localized nodes: Edge deployments could also see the form of stand-alone servers that could be deployed in urban areas; such implementations could take advantage of the foundations and terraces of buildings.
Convergence: An emerging trend is the convergence of servers and storage in a single box. The availability of lightning-fast express memory and solid-state drives have enabled unified combinations of server and storage.
Solid State Drive Penetration: The penetration of solid-state drive products has already reached critical mass in consumer technology. In the coming years, data centers will include the adoption of such drives, and by 2020, bulk hard drive cages may have been completely replaced.
Docker containers: Docker containers help package software as ready-to-run code. These containers include everything that is required to run an application, everything that is required to be installed on a server. Such container instances have seen steady uptake and are expected to increase. Docker containers will lead to a major reduction in server quantity and space.
In the years to come, IT management teams will focus on procedures and policies, not hardware. The nature of these changes will put enormous pressure on legacy systems. There will be a paradigm shift that will see a greater commodification of hardware data centerand focus on economical, consumer-centric, future-proof design.
