The data center is increasingly shifting to a hybrid model as comfort levels with a more distributed IT architecture grow.
That’s according to separate research from the Uptime Institute and enterprise cloud provider Nutanix.
The Uptime Institute — which defines hybrid as “a mix of on-premises data center capacity and off-premises resources such as colocation, cloud, and hosting” — said data center operators were dealing with significantly more variables compared with five years ago.
“Hybrid IT is now the norm, creating technology, organizational, and management complexity,” it reported.
Meanwhile, Nutanix, in its eighth annual State of the Enterprise Datacenter Report, identified a growing willingness among data center operators to embrace a hybrid approach.
Data center operators are increasingly comfortable with hybrid IT arrangements
When asked about their attitudes to public, private, and hybrid cloud, respondents “overwhelmingly” preferred hybrid, Nutanix found, identifying a reluctance to shift entirely to the public cloud.
“Public cloud’s low percentages don’t mean it’s not still useful; it may not be trending yet, but times are changing, and since most respondents prefer a hybrid, this means they do see the value in public clouds,” Nutanix said.
AGILE DATA
The parallel research comes as experts anticipate significant changes to enterprise IT architecture in the coming years.
Writing in a recent blog post, senior Gartner analyst David Cappuccio predicted the demise of the traditional data center as organizations gear up for the fast-changing realities of the marketplace.
“IT’s primary function will be to enable the business to be more agile, to enter new markets more quickly, to deliver services closer to the customer, and to position specific workloads based on business, regulatory and geopolitical impacts,” Cappuccio wrote.
“The role of the traditional data center is being relegated to that of a legacy holding area, dedicated to very specific services that cannot be supported elsewhere, or supporting those systems that are most economically efficient on-premises.”
According to Gartner, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center in favor of more flexible, distributed arrangements by 2025.
MINIMIZING DOWNTIME
Despite a growing receptiveness to hybrid cloud, its adoption is leaving organizations more vulnerable to outages.
According to the Uptime Institute research, the number of survey respondents reporting IT downtime in the past 12 months increased on the previous year.
Similar to Uptime’s findings, the Nutanix report reveals that hybrid cloud arrangements continue to grow in favor among enterprise data center operators
“Is having workloads spread across on-site, colocation, and cloud deployments making overall IT more resilient?” asked report author Rhonda Ascierto. “More than half of respondents (61%) said that it has, despite about one third of them having suffered an outage in the past year.”
When working within a hybrid environment, companies would do well to assign ownership to a dedicated point of contact and not have high-level accountability spread across numerous stakeholders, the report recommended.
The institute also pointed to the increased adoption of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) technology, with almost two thirds of survey respondents having purchased or developed DCIM software for deployment in the enterprise.
Other key findings from the Uptime Institute’s report, available for download here, include:
- The increasing importance of edge computing capabilities as organizations require the ability to process data closer to source. Only about one in four of respondents said they did not anticipate building out edge computing capacity in the years to come.
- A lack of of preparedness for the effects of climate change on IT infrastructure. This comes as new research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon warns rising sea levels will place significant portions of the internet’s critical infrastructure in heavily populated U.S. coastal areas at risk of inundation in the next 15 years.
- Growth in rack density issues and an intensification of skills shortages across the data center.
The Uptime Institute’s survey was based on the responses of 867 data center operators and IT professionals worldwide.
