Networked Enterprise Featured Article

With the rise of smartphones and cloud services, the data center is busier than ever. Companies such as Facebook, Microsoft (News - Alert) and Google are busy building out additional data center infrastructure, and many businesses also are moving to the cloud and using more data centers to support their operations.

The data center is becoming the heart of business, making data center management big business.

With that in mind, here are four data center trends that should play out in 2016.

1. Increased Virtualization

Most data centers already use some form of virtualization, but the trend will increase this year both on the server and the network infrastructure level.

Currently no more than 15 percent of data center server capacity is being used, according to recent research by Stanford University’s Jonathan Koomey and Anthesis Group’s Jon Taylor. This is a shockingly low number, and virtualization can help by optimizing server use and enabling data centers to better use existing resources instead of adding new ones.

At the same time, software-defined networking and network functions virtualization are making the network level more flexible, too, enabling the data center to adjust quickly not only on the server level but also on the infrastructure level.

2. Energy Efficiency Focus

One of the largest cost centers in the data center is energy use. More efficient processor technology has cut down on energy needs for servers themselves, but cooling and energy use still are big issues.

In 2016, expect to see data centers getting more innovative with cooling techniques to cut down on energy use. Technologies such as immersive cooling and hot/cold air isolation systems are being adopted fast.

3. Localization

With increased amounts of data pushed back and forth between users and the data center, especially video content, this year expect to see an added push toward the creation of more geographically varied data centers that reside closer to end-users. This cuts down on latency and eases the burden of moving data back and forth.

At the same time, there’s increasing interest in data security. This is leading some countries, most notably those in the European Union, to mandate that cloud data be stored in specific countries. EU users must have their cloud data stored in the EU, for instance, not on US servers. This also is spurring increased data center localization.

4. Common Standards

The Internet of Things is and will continue to put pressure on the data center. This will require a change in data center management; today’s data centers include thousands of devices that speak many different languages, including IPMI, SNMP, and Mod Bus.

Look for a push for common standards to simplify the management of IoT data, and new solutions to address the wide range of languages such as Redfish, a RESTful API for the management of scale-out commodity servers.