Ten Data Center Trends To Expect in 2013
2012 has drawn to a close, and 2013 is at long last begun. We’ve spent the last few weeks looking back to the past, with retrospective examinations of the worst data breaches, the best stories, and the most emergent trends. Today, we’re done looking back: we’re going to look forward. Here, according to a number of industry experts, are some trends that any data center operator worth their salt should expect going into the New Year.The Evolution of Data Security
It’s baffling that, even in light of all the data breaches we’ve seen this year; more than one in five data centers don’t actually bother regularly testing their security policies. Worse, many organizations implement data security solutions which are reactive, rather than proactive. As we move into 2013, Cisco’s Evelyn Desouza predicts that this will change. “As organizations look to achieve greater levels of efficiency,” she writes; “they will continue to find static security models a great inhibitor. IT execs and data center teams will need to evolve security processes and controls to be more flexible, and cater to an increasingly virtual world where services and virtual machines are less in their control, dynamic, and self-provisioned.”
In other words, 2013 will be the year that many organizations finally put archaic security models behind them, and we can all sleep a little easier at night knowing our data has a lower chance of falling into the wrongs hands. Hopefully.
The Fiscal Cliff: A Bleak Year Ahead For IT
Not all the predictions for this year are good ones. There are some rather distressing signs, both within the tech industry and without; which underscore the possibility that the United States is going to descend into yet another recession. We are, as the saying goes, on the very edge of a fiscal cliff.
“News of weak server sales, continuing turmoil at Hewlett-Packard and the ongoing U.S. political impasse over the so-called “fiscal cliff” has not given tech industry watchers much to cheer about,” writes ComputerWorld’s Marc Ferranti. “Though worldwide server shipments went up in the third quarter of 2012, revenue declined due to economic uncertainty in some parts of the world.” In other words, it’s already rough sailing for IT vendors, and it’s slated to only get rougher.
“Vendors that work with the government are already being hurt,” wrote Patrick Thibodeu “SRA International, for instance, told investors recently that uncertainty around future academic spending cuts is ‘causing some clients to delay contract starts.’”
There’s a silver lining in this, of course – depending on where you’re standing.
“This very disruptive environment actually favors the disruptors.” noted ImmixGroup co-founder Steve Charles.
Even More Mobile
Not surprisingly, mobility is still a big thing in the technology industry. Gartner predicts that, come 2013; it’ll become even bigger: the consumerization of IT is going to continue at a breakneck pace (becoming virtually impossible for enterprise organizations to prevent or moderate), and HTML5 will expand even further into the world of mobile app development. We’ll spare you the details of what benefits and disadvantages come with mobile expansion – that news is old hat by now.
Suffice it to say; 2013 will drive the point home: mobility really is the future; and IT staff, data center operators, and business professionals had best start hearing the music unless they want to be left behind.
Cloud Computing and the Hybridization of IT
“Infrastructure and operations professionals must be able to deploy and manage hybrid clouds,” states The Cloud Times; working on a report from Gartner. “Gartner is predicting that a lot of current private clouds will somehow evolve to become public clouds.” The cloud is picking up steam, and hybrid clouds look like they might well take the industry by storm this year. As a result, anyone in IT is going to have to learn how to work with and deploy cloud computing setups – both public and private.
They know this, too.
“A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage role is emerging as IT organizations realize they have a responsibility to improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services,” notes Network World.
In-Memory Goes Mainstream
In-memory computing –essentially; a process in which services and platforms utilize the RAM of dedicated servers to store information rather than accessing it through disc drives – is starting to take off. 2013 might well see it start to emerge into the mainstream, according to Network World; which states that it might become a central fixture in the tech industry “over the next two years.” This is a very, very good thing.
“Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tenths of a millisecond to detect correlations and patterns,” writes Michael Cooney; “the possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation.”
Analytics Get Actionable
As I’m sure many of you have noticed, the metrics surrounding the day-to-day operations of data centers have been steadily improving over the past year or so. This isn’t a trend that’s isolated to the data industry, of course: most technology companies are enjoying the fact that virtually every single action can be analyzed and simulated. Network World expects that, as we move forward into 2013, this upward trend will continue
Big Data Management Becomes Vital
Big data is getting bigger. As that happens, it’s getting more and more fragmented. If an organization truly wants to determine the best course of action, they’re going to need a means of categorizing and analyzing it. Traditional analytics software simply isn’t up to the task.
This year, many organizations realized this: as a result, many professionals are “moving towards multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts, and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata,” writes Network World. This will, they continue, “become the ‘logical’ enterprise data warehouse.
Load Balancing and the Personal Cloud
There’s a lot of stuff happening in the technology industry. The mobile craze has reached a point of no return, where virtually every consumer in the world owns a smartphone. The Internet is the lifeblood of our society, and data is transferred in larger and larger amounts every year. Cloud vendors have taken center stage. What do all these events have in common?
They need an infrastructure to back them. Load balancing (and scalability) will become absolutely critical as 2013 progresses and the amount of strain put on data centers the world over grows ever larger. That this year has been predicted as a time when the personal cloud will reach the consumer market en masse doesn’t help matters.
DCIM Gains Momentum
With the massive growth of the cloud, the Internet, and the mobile web, DCIM firms are going to be sitting pretty this year.
“This has been a critical year for the data center,” reads an Nlyte Software Press Release. “According to a recent Forrester ResearchForrsights Survey; nearly half of all enterprises in North America will set aside budgets for private-cloud related investments in 2013. As cloud computing grows exponentially, the role of the data center becomes pivotal to the success and failure of a company.”
The press release continues, predicting that “DCIM will continue to build momentum, well past the curiosity stage previously seen.”
Ecosystem Integration
Last but not least; Gartner predicted that we’re currently witnessing a market shift; away from “loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches.” Battles between large vendors coupled with the desire for lower cost, better security, and more simplicity result in a single logical conclusion: a shift towards more integrated IT ecosystems. We’re already seeing this to some degree in the data industry; with a number of different “data center in a box” products hitting the market. Cloud platforms and services are largely becoming “one stop shops” for whatever your organization requires, and mobile is starting to seamlessly incorporate itself into system management.
In other words, the fragmented nature of data infrastructure might finally be smoothing itself out a bit.
Next time, we’ll look at a few New Years’ Resolutions which you can set as goals for your organization.