Posted on
More from News
The coming 12 months are set to be a pivotal time for the data centre industry. With the amount of information being generated growing at an exponential rate, the pressure is on for professionals to upgrade their facilities and ensure they have sufficient capacity to cope with the new data-driven era.
As a result, investments in new technology are also set to rise significantly. IT Pro Portal noted that by 2024, the global data centre infrastructure management market is set to surpass $3 billion (£2.44 billion), meaning there will be many opportunities and innovations for professionals to deal with in the coming months and years.
The publication spoke to Jeff Klaus, general manager of data centre solutions at Intel, for his perspective on what the data centre will look like in 2017, and he highlighted a few key trends and technologies that businesses will have to be aware of.
For instance, he observed that the influx of information from sources such as Internet of Things sensors will demand new ways of managing and looking at data. This increased traffic will require the implementation of tools that can not only gather and store this data, but model it effectively, display where it came from and provide a holistic view of a company's entire environment.
"This requires businesses to not just look at data coming from physical locations they own, but also from any site where they are collecting data from, and the path it took to get to them," Mr Klaus said.
Therefore, tools will need to be able to reach beyond the perimeter of the data centre and be able to associate events happening elsewhere in the world with the telemetry they receive from their own on-site machines.
Another key trend for the data centre industry in 2017 and beyond will be automation. This will be vital in cutting down on many of the manual processes that data centre managers rely on day-to-day. Mr Klaus noted that 43 per cent of data centres are still dependent on manual processes, such as the use of Excel spreadsheets for planning, or even walking the data centre with a tape measure.
The result of this is that more than half of professionals in these locations spend at least 40 per cent of their time every month on activities such as capacity planning and forecasting, which could be greatly reduced with the use of automation.
Mr Klaus also forecast a key trend for 2017 will be improved integration between infrastructure telemetry and application-level, telemetry. At present, these processes are usually handled by different teams who often have different goals in mind.
"Over the past year we have seen large CSP type companies start to tie these elements together and be able to see the benefits of optimising their environment utilisation based on their workload," he continued. As the results of these initial trials become clear, this approach will spread to both large enterprises and smaller companies, which will be a key driver for data centre investments going forward.
