The Internet of Things is very much a disruptive technology from a data center perspective. When it was initially announced, the IoT sounded as though it could change the face of the industry and make computers more integrated into things. This was great news for data centers since it meant they could look forward to deeper incorporation into the industry and wider use cases across a larger number of areas.
While data centers have anticipated that the IoT was likely to change their hardware, few expected that the IoT would lead to such massive sweeping changes in data center management paradigms as we see today. Information Week notes how technology like Edge Computing has impacted data centers showing that these impacts are widespread and potentially industry-changing. But that’s what we expect from disruptive technology, right?
Connectivity to Aid The IoT
The IoT depends heavily on interconnectivity between devices and servers. This is one of the core elements behind the establishment and maintenance of a data center – the ability to create and maintain connections between servers. The IoT’s demands, however, are far more massive than anything data centers have experienced in the past. No one user, no matter how big, could generate as much data flow as a few hundred IoT devices connected to the network for a single day. According to Schneider Electric, we are likely to see transfers in the vicinity of 1.3 zettabytes per month by the end of 2020. This data needs to be handled and transferred seamlessly and having a data center that is prepared for the task is of utmost importance.
A Change in Architecture
Data centers have traditionally been where things were stored for easy access within a company‘s intranet or externally. With the creation of the cloud and systems such as Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, the data center’s usefulness is no longer in its ability to store and process data, but rather in its ability to provide access to the cloud. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), we are likely to see as much as half of new businesses incorporating IoT in some fashion by 2020. What this means for data centers is that instead of being the traditional system that would be used for housing these companies‘ data, they would instead serve as accessibility portals to the cloud allowing these companies to experience the IoT through their servers. The IoT will impact data centers by driving capacity through them, making them crucial in the operation of decentralized business teams and entire companies.
IoT and Management of the Data Center
Data center management is already different from the way it was less than five years ago. The IoT is likely to speed up its evolution even more. Because of the massive volumes of data that systems are likely going to be generating, data centers will need increased bandwidth to deal with that data flow, as well as a different approach to distribution, based on importance rather than first-come-first-serve. Additionally, the data center will need to change its thinking from gathering and storing data to be processed with a private lender list to instead processing data in streams, usually from assets that are spread out geographically to generate a complete picture. This might be simpler for large companies, but it is likely to be more complex for datacenters since they would need to oversee the on-premises infrastructure as well as the remote locations that data is coming from to ensure security on both ends. Capacity management will be the rock on which we make or break data centers as the IoT becomes more prevalent in the industry.
Sweeping Changes over Short Periods
As we mentioned at the start of this discussion, IoT is at its heart a disruptive technology and the technologies that exist closest to it in proximity will be the ones most affected by the ripples it generates. Data centers are a double-edged sword for IoT. On the one hand, a data center offers an ideal hub, sort of like a service provider that affords businesses to get into using and benefitting from the IoT. However, because of the sort of service, it is required to provide, the data center must prove itself up to the task or else fail in its purpose to the IoT. To fulfil its purpose, the data center will obviously need to take stock of what it currently does and how its current systems can be improved in the areas of data transfer and connectivity to bring the most benefit to its clients.
