5 Trends That Will Impact Data Centers

By Author: vinod
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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web once said, ‘Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.’ And thanks to the new age technologies, data in the world keeps on growing and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day and over 90% of the data we have today is generated over the last two years alone.

Unbelievable, right?

People taking photos, searching for something on the internet, browsing and sharing information, and posting an image on social media also generates data. On the whole, we are generating gigantic amounts of data every day.

Now, an interesting question arises. Where is this humongous amount of data stored?

Data Centers.

Yep, data centers are where corporate giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many other businesses (including SMEs and startups) store their data securely.

What is a Data Center?
A Data Center is a centralized location, a physical building where data is stored. Businesses can rent some space in data centers, in which they can ...
... store the data, access it when needed (anywhere and anytime), and manage it securely. Additionally, data centers provide backup, disaster recovery, data management, networking options.

The Big Benefit of Data Centers:
As said earlier, we humans are producing large amounts of data and it is estimated that by 2020, we are going to produce 1.7Mb data per second. A simple internal storage unit is not going to sustain anymore. And thanks to the latest technologies and the invention of data centers, businesses don’t have to worry about their IT requirements.

The continuous transmission of data has led conglomerates and other established businesses to build their own private data centers. The other small industries and startups can rent some space in the data centers to store and manage their data.

For instance, consider the financial, educational, or retail industries. They need to use, manage, and store huge amounts of data while also working with it on a day-to-day basis. And if not for a data center, they had to manage the regular IT operations in-house by hiring professionals which can cost them lots of money, instead of focusing on their core business aspects. Data centers hire professional employees to manage their daily IT needs.

Therefore, having a data center can be hugely beneficial for businesses of any size and type. They can leverage the many advantages of a data center like having security, high-speed bandwidth, zero network issues, and disaster recovery services.

Like everything else, the data centers, its infrastructure, and technologies have changed over the years. In this article, let us have a look at the latest trends that will impact the present and t e impacting the future of the data centers.

The 5 Trends That Will Impact Data Centers:

Artificial intelligence:
Ah, machine intelligence. No matter which aspect, technology, or software you take, AI has made its distinctive mark. AI is being deployed to enhance various aspects of data centers and businesses are in a race to maneuver AI to their advantage. According to Gartner, 30% of data centers that don’t leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning won’t be operational by 2020.

Artificial intelligence with natural language processing and machine learning is increasingly being used to improve every aspect of the data center. From improving cybersecurity, boosting network efficiency to improving reliability.

Security:
Data centers have to deal with numerous cyber threats. Businesses can leverage AI to learn network behavior and detect the threats before they cause any kind of damage.

Downtime:
Many data centers promise their clients to provide zero downtime that has no outages. They hire people to detect and solve the issues but this is quite a tedious task and takes up a lot of resources. AI will help data centers to monitor server performance, network congestion, and disk utilization and detect the problems early on and eliminate the risks, thereby saving the precious data of users.

Monitoring:
The job of an employee working in a data center is to continuously monitor the data, find defects, and eliminate them. But as humans, we are prone to make mistakes one time or another. AI with the help of machine learning will help the data centers with these repetitive tasks and monitor the data with more accuracy and find errors, then notifying the user.

Hyperscale Data Centers:
While the data center in itself is a huge digital transformation, the hyper-scale data center tiers and its features are going above and beyond the expectations of a user. With cloud computing on the rise, proper infrastructural demand is also increasing.

Hyper-scale data centers are the best way to facilitate the needs of the ever-growing demand as they are larger than an enterprise data center. They can house thousands of servers without any problems and furthermore, they can provide more power and server capacity.

Scaling will be a lot easier and massive amounts of data can be easily accessed, managed, and operated. Many corporate giants like Microsoft, AWS, and Google have hyper-scale data centers that can accommodate billions of users.

Advanced Cooling Technology:
With millions of servers continuously running, the heat generated from them is enormous. Globally, data centers consume over 416 terawatts of electricity. This not only increases the power costs but damages the environment.

Previously, data centers depended upon the traditional air conditioners to cool up their servers. With many technologies and especially artificial intelligence, data centers have come up with some modern cooling methods, liquid cooling being one of them. It is a cost-reliable technique that cools the heated up data server fastly and effectively. The big-name companies are continuously striving to make a conscious effort to improve cooling methods.

Edge Computing:
Speed is one of the deciding factors when it comes to choosing a data center. Transmitting, downloading large amounts of data needs to happen at the speed of light, and data centers are always in a race to increase the processing and downloading time.

As our speed factors are quite limited, experts have come up with edge computing to compensate speed by reducing distance. In layman terms, edge computing is increasing the processing speed and storage space close to the user as possible by minimizing the distance the data has to travel to reach them. It helps in processing large amounts of data when needed and used across various industries like IoT, augmented reality, etc.

Virtualization:
Data centers have always been known for being a storage powerhouse. Now thanks to new technologies, especially, virtualization data centers are being used as more than just a storage space. They are turning into software-defined data centers.

Virtualization helps data centers become more efficient and virtualizes the computing needs, increasing the storage power through the servers into a software. It makes data center management more efficient and permits users to run the same number of servers on fewer machines. It also reduces data redundancy and handles any duplications efficiently.

Summarising the article, data centers are rapidly evolving and the new emerging technologies are playing a huge role in enhancing its performance. They no longer belong to just the large scale enterprises but startups and SMEs are also leveraging the data centers to its maximum efficiency.

Vinod Kumar is an independent writer who likes to write by the day and read by night. His out-of-the-box writing has helped numerous businesses to grow rapidly in the market. It is his passion and love for writing that helped him become a proficient writer no matter the niche.