Datacenter Trends that will transform the Server Industry in 2015

By: Sudharsan R, Commercial Marketing Head, Dell India

The year 2014 has been a crucial year for the Datacenter. There has been greater acceptability of what IDC describes as the 3^rd Platform technologies – Cloud, Mobility and Internet of Things which have fuelled demands in the IT segments. Additionally there has been a greater need for efficiency, integration, consolidation, automation and reduced costs across verticals. The server industry in specific has been most impacted by this due to a complete shift in workloads, densification of servers and investment in web applications and data analytics. This has translated in the form of major leaps in terms of innovations, ability to handle varied workloads and integration with storage and networking components.

2015 will be not different in terms of change, innovation and customer demands in the Server space. In speaking with customers it’s evident that trends such as big data, mobility, BYOD, cloud computing and software-defined everything are top of mind will have a much greater impact on the datacenter in the coming year. There will be a shift from the traditional IT approach which typically delivers services based on transactional system-of-records and processes built on proven architectures that scale and provide 100 percent reliability. The new IT approach will typically focus on social engagement rather than transactions and there will be new service models where analytics and big data are the business, requiring an infrastructure that supports high volume and high velocity data processing.

This shift in IT approach will transpire into several new data center trends. These include:

1. Hyperscale Computing Paradigms will reach the mainstream: Web technology companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have been successful in building their own datacenters that have been able to match up to the workload demands that their businesses demands. These datacenters are constructed to scale with the demands of specific web front-end applications.

Other organizations today are realizing the immense benefits in terms of flexibility and efficiency that can be brought about by replicating the similar efficiency seen in these web companies to their own organizations. Vendors will now start to leverage hyperscale design principles as a model to meet enterprise needs but in a way that works for each business and takes into account the distinct differences between web companies and the traditional enterprises.

2. Converged Infrastructure will gain more popularity: Converged Infrastructure provides organizations with two major benefits – reduced datacenter costs and simplified management. This reduces personnel requirements in terms of training and knowledge, and limits the overall number of components to manage or trouble shoot. Due to this many enterprises are taking this approach and this trend is likely to continue in the coming year.

3. Server-side Flash: Businesses today are looking for speed and efficiency from their datacenters. If a business-critical application doesn’t respond in seconds, sales and customer satisfaction suffer. No matter how fast the servers, latency between storage and compute slows down the workloads that depend most on performance—like online transactions and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In light of this, Flash cache technology is becoming popular and will gain prominence in the coming year. It brings the most frequently accessed data closer to the server, thereby minimizing data travel from storage to the server.

4. Need for Flexibility and Scalability: Due to the rapid advancements in technology that are taking place and are likely to continue in the future, organizations will look for open and scalable solutions that prevent vendor/product or solutions lock-in. Today vendors are developing such solutions across all aspects of the datacenter. More and more organizations are beginning to adopt this approach in their datacenters.

One such example is that of Hirotec India. Hirotec India needed a highly scalable data center solution and improved mobility for its design team in order to support the expansion of its design and manufacturing services for the automotive industry. Hirotec deployed a solutions consisting of scalable storage and servers which helped the meet the high demands of the automotive industry.

5. Microservers will solve important niche requirements: Microservers are smaller servers that has the similar functionality of a server. High density, energy efficiency and a space-saving form factor are the key factors that make this category attractive for tasks that are not extremely compute-intensive. Microservers are especially popular among small- to medium-sized businesses that need a server but do not need a full-scale rack or tower server. Microserver adoption will increase in the coming year, especially with continued innovations in 64-bit ARM and x86-based technologies hitting the market this year.

6.Datacenter management will go increasingly mobile. Managing the data center will remain an up most priority. The good news is that administrators who not so long ago wore pagers to alert them of datacenter problems will find a growing number of options for monitoring, managing and automating infrastructure hardware from a mobile device.

The IT industry is at a turning point of sorts and just around the bend lies the possibility of more agile and efficient IT, capable of high-performance and managing vast data. According to a statement by Gartner by 2017, Web-scale IT will be an architectural approach found operating in 50 percent of global enterprises, up from less than 10 percent in 2013. Thus, 2015 will continue to be a year where major strides will take place in transforming enterprise IT infrastructure and organizations will need to embrace this to stay ahead in the highly competitive industry landscape.