As IT organizations consider their existing data center environments, they face challenges on many fronts. There is a need for digital disruption and transformation to change the way business is done. Today, companies are trying to actively engage their consumers and offer them better tailored experiences. Since, there is acceleration in the pace of business; firms are discovering ways in which they can offer new products and services in the market at a greater speed. They are struggling with infrastructures that are developed on complicated processes. Furthermore, these outdated systems are not economical cannot deliver the scalability and flexibility that will help businesses succeed In some cases, organizations are installing public and hybrid cloud services that can deliver agility and flexibility to solve issues that internal IT organizations cannot yet address. Nevertheless, public cloud adoption can create compliance risks. Therefore, IT teams needs to find ways to offer services seamlessly and securely across private and public clouds. To keep pace with escalating business demands, organizations need an agile, service-oriented IT model for data centers that leverages both private and public clouds. Therefore they need a modern data center that has an integrated approach that enables them to offer agility, security and scalability in order to drive growth and innovation. To power innovation and growth, IT teams need to link applications across clouds and devices with security, compliance, and availability and a consistent architecture in an economical budget. Therefore, they need to develop a data center that is virtualized, software defined, and automated, with a consistent operational model for infrastructure and application delivery.
Technology is changing
There are many technologies that are changing the direction of information technology such as block chain, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, cloud and virtualization are influencing old data centers. With the data requirements rising at the speed of light, data centers need to keep up with a quick pace of technological innovation to meet them. The quick growth of AI and machine learning, IoT connectivity, business process automation and block chain application has allowed data centers to transform from rigid consolidated structures to a distributed placement entity.
Inclusion of Artificial Intelligence in the Data Center
Gartner analyst, Dave Cappuccio has forecasted that nearly 80% of today’s data centers will be shut down by 2025. These numbers show that current data centers face many problems and are unable to adjust to the needs of this age. That’s when the inclusion of cloud technology comes into the picture as it has already changed a lot in the world of data centers and is poised to make even more reforms in recent years. In fact, Cisco has forecasted predict that cloud data centers will replace traditional data centers within three years. Furthermore, Cisco claimed that 94 percent of workload and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers by 2021, which means that only six percent of the workload will be managed by traditional data centers. One essential factor currently prompting the migration from outdated data centers to cloud data centers is the larger degree of virtualization in the cloud space. It is a process of providing space to physical centers in a data center facility along with storage, which greatly reduces the costs of facilities, hardware, cooling, and simplifies maintenance and administration. Hence, inclusion of AI will remove various difficulties from the outdated data centers.
Modernization Advantages of Data Centers
The incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning benefits many industries especially storage and processing industry because they would use half the energy of a typical data center. Moreover, artificial intelligence and machine learning enhances the management and upgrades the operations of the industries. When compared to outdated data centers, AI enabled cloud data centers provides developed capacity, enhanced performances and a system that can be managed with ease.
Following are the ways in which data centers will provide solutions to problems that are faced by outdated data centers.
Efficiency of Energy
According to the Energy department’s U.S Data Center Energy report the energy usage is expected to hit 73 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020, that is more than 1.8 percent of the country’s electricity use. This shows how artificial intelligence is becoming an important tool for conserving electricity and overheating. Incorporating AI based techniques will make the power conserving process efficient, safeguarded and more economical.
Optimization of servers
With the incorporation of AI-based predictive analysis in the data center, will be able to distribute workload across several servers across the company. This will help the load of the data center to become easy to use and more predictive. Along with that, load balancing tools which are inbuilt with AI capabilities will be able to pick up from previous data and run the distribution of workload in an efficient way. With this companies will be able to track the performance of servers, usage of disks and congestions of networks. Moreover, it will quicken the upgrading server storage systems, finding possible faults in the system, enhance processing times and minimize risk factors in the system. The quickening of these processes will simplify the optimization of servers.
Forecasting failures and troubleshooting
Modern data centers utilize AI based applications in order to forecast failures beforehand so that data centers can quickly determine the root cause of an unplanned downtime in the form of severe weather conditions. Predictions of failures are done ahead of time so that they can troubleshoot the issue on a high priority and resume functions of the data center before there is a major impact on the business. Along with that the machine learning systems and artificial importance can be used to understand the failures that can be fixed and identify the users who may be affected by this failure. An automated solution can be developed to prevent failures. The AI machine learning can interrupt through the entire system and avoid the repetition of the same failure
Monitoring and storage of data
With the inclusion of machine learning in modern data centers and AI taking over the common job of data monitoring, IT professionals and companies can concentrate on improving the quality of tasks that are handled by them. In addition to the monitoring of data, it would be essential to store huge amount of data safely. With AI’s capacity to make smart decisions on storage optimization, there will be a transformation in storage systems and management.
As listed, these are the advantages of the modern data center that will continue to innovate disruptive technologies by providing solutions to issues. With disruptive technologies constantly changing, there would be various upcoming trends in the current year.
Future Trends of the Data Center Industry
Since the data center industry is constantly evolving in terms of its concepts and tasks, there would be a development in technology and the business process of a company to improve its efficiency and do its best. As a result of that, there would be a change in the usage and implementation of the functioning of data centers.
Here are the trends that will impact data centers in the current years
Transforming the edge workforce
With the proliferation of IoT and data, data centers will continue to upgrade with the help of edge which has become an essential complement to provide access of computing resources, data and processing to the customer. As a result of thus, Organizations will keep decentralizing their methodologies to tend to the necessities of their digital business structure .As the Edge solution continues to advance, there is a decline in the staff of the edge workforce. Hence there will be a transformation in the hiring process of data center professionals from regular training programs towards job specific guidance.
Colocation as a service
Data centers will focus on offering services to companies where these organizations can put their data in a space which will help to build their capabilities.
Accessibility of High Performance Computing
2019 will see the accessibility of high performance computing for companies that want to maintain a cutting –edge advantage over their competitors. Furthermore, it will be a business differentiator as large organizations are going to require an end to end solution.
Installation of Private cloud infrastructures
According to the IDC survey, more than 28% of cloud spending is being focused on the private cloud. With most companies shifting to the cloud, most of the companies will shift to private cloud infrastructures since they do not want to give up control. Therefore solutions will be used to offer cloud services to business clients without removing their information from the private cloud. Besides that, in 2019, the market will focus on a balanced approach as public cloud infrastructures will be used as per the requirement. Furthermore, data centers will assist companies with services to install workloads where they can be protected.
Installing a cloud-based data center management
Data Center Infrastructure Management is installed as an on premise programming framework and will monitor data from infrastructure solutions in one data center. The cloud-based management applications enable the user to gather enormous information from a broader range of IoT-enabled products. Furthermore, the software could be utilized over a substantial number of localized data centers deployed in a huge number of geologically distributed areas. This new software would offer services to clients so that they could make progressively informed data driven decisions .Additionally they use pools of data in order to store the collected data for future analysis of patterns and assist to make strategic work operations productive in many ways. According to Accenture, just 13% of enterprises have understood the full impact of their digital investments. In 2019, this percentage will increase with expansion of arrangement among IT and business. By utilizing productive IT, client experiences will be customized, effectiveness of operations can be enhanced and the clients’ issues can be solved.
Adoption 5G networking in devices
With 5G predicted to be the next generation of wireless networking, it will make an effect in the data center because of its features. 5G has incredible features which will support more wireless devices and associated devices with more volume, with ten times lower latency and ten times enhancement in battery life. In 2019, if data centers find an inactively sensible application such as IoT and begin a pilot 5G project, the 5G wireless networks can be adopted in 2020.
Need for trained cybersecurity experts to fill skill shortages
In 2019, security will continue to be a major issue because of frequent and larger hacks. Since there is the implementation of IoT and proliferation of data, there is a scope of frequent and larger hacks .Hence, there would be increase in the threat surface in the digital world which will increase the threat surface in the digital world. Besides that, there is a skill shortage for cybersecurity .Therefore; the future trend in security could see 3.5 million job openings for the position of cyber security experts by 2021 in order to fill the gap of skill shortage.
To conclude, it can be said that by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning in a data center would modernize the data centers because it would offer numerous solutions according to the necessities of the digital business. AI based data centers have many advantages over the outdated ones and will provide innovative solutions to problems that are faced by businesses. Besides that, technology in data centers in constantly changing so there could be changes in the way technology is implemented in the data centers. These changes can be seen through the future trends of the data center industry. Furthermore, there would also be changes in skill sets so that organizations succeed because of data center modernization.
