Just when we got used to the data centers that surround us today, their nature and function are poised to change again… but at least its for the better.
So what’s behind the anticipated evolution? The Internet of Things, we are told, has a potential transformational effect on the data center market, its customers, technology providers, technologies, and sales and marketing models, according to Gartner.
Gartner estimates that the IoT will include 26 billion units installed by 2020, and by that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services.
“IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time,” said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. “Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges.
The IoT connects remote assets and provides a data stream between the asset and centralized management systems. Those assets can then be integrated into new and existing organizational processes to provide information on status, location, functionality, and so on. Real-time information enables more accurate understanding of status, and it enhances utilization and productivity through optimized usage and more accurate decision support. Business and data analytics give insights into the business requirements data feed from the IoT environment and will help predict the fluctuations of IoT-enriched data and information.
“The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network, as real-time business processes are at stake,” adds Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT.”
