Data Centre Predictions For 2017

With new and advanced introductions of technology every year, the cloud and data industry change as well. Hence, it is very important for companies to stay up-to-date to get best results from this industry. Keeping this in mind, here are a few predictions experts have made about the data centre and could for the year 2017:

Capacity over Performance

A recent report published by Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis, shows flat requirements for IOPS/GB over the last year for the first time since the study started in 2012 (Permabit, 2016). The ubiquitous availability of inexpensive flash storage that can address the majority of performance requirements enables the focus to shift from speed to capacity while radically improving storage density.  In 2017, the key metric for IT purchases will shift from IOPS, to $/GB and data reduction will be widely used to drive down costs across primary and secondary storage both on premises and in clouds.

Public and Private Cloud Coexist

In 2010 “Hybrid Cloud” emerged as a marketing term, which advertised the existing infrastructure ability evolving to support more cloud applications along with new workloads that were shifting to the public cloud. With the growth of cloud sophistication in the following years awareness of cost and efficiency of the public cloud changed the discussion. The success of public cloud providers quickly put pressure on private data centers to move from the traditional methods. According to 451 Research Market Monitor, despite the success of the public cloud, private and hosted clouds still have a 75% hold on the cloud infrastructure (Veeam, 2017). Since more companies have now started to adopt the “cloud first” policy for their applications, it’s imperative that the public and private clouds coexist. For this to be a successful endeavor, however, private data centers will need to buy or build their own true cloud infrastructure that employ virtualization, commodity hardware, open-source software, and data reduction technologies much like those utilized by the public cloud providers.

The Open Software Defined Data Center

10 years ago, if an organisation were to implement a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), it would require them to develop it from scratch. This could only be performed by organisations that had huge software engineering organizations like Amazon. While a traditional IT organisation focused more on supporting the data enter servers, switches and storage equipment as they had in the previous decade. Today, with the availability of mature, open source software and other vendors offering services that support such software, this is changing. Data Center managers reap huge economic benefits from vendor neutrality, hardware independence, and increased utilization, while still personalizing for their own unique business requirements.  

In today’s day and age, technology offers endless possibilities for organisations to provide remarkable services based on information. The idea of data being available whenever and wherever, is now a requirement. Long gone are the days, when downtime was considered normal for a business. In 2017, data centers will serve as a critical player for both storing information and providing services to customers, employees and partners.