Commentators frequently speculate on the future state of the data center. But for IT managers and data center operators making purchasing decisions, the direction of travel for IT hardware is more than an exercise in conjecture.
Understanding where the data center is headed helps place your real-time decision making into a longer view. Here are five trend lines that appear clear right now:
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- Data will continue to grow.
- Operators will need IT solutions that are increasingly flexible, open, and distributed.
- Open source is the future of IT hardware.
- Flash technology will keep dropping in price and increasing in adoption, accelerated by the emergence of the NVMe protocol.
- With increasing need for storage capacity and with continued advances in performance, hard disk drives aren’t disappearing any time soon.
On the final point and notwithstanding the rise of flash technology, the high capacity and lower costs of spinning disks continue to resonate with the hyperscalers and the massive clouds they manage. Much in the same way that tape is still in deployment, HDD will remain a staple fixture in the data center for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, a growing awareness of the need for flexibility and distributed capacity both in storage and compute is pushing the boundaries of how hardware interconnects.
Enterprise Data Center
To some, the idea of IT hardware as a fixed element in the enterprise data center is already anachronistic.
Speaking to CNBC in March 2019 after the announcement of its agreement to acquire high-performance networking firm Mellanox, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said thinking of the data center simply as a collection of disparate hardware no longer measured up to reality.
Data center workloads such as machine learning and data analytics don’t fit on one computer or one server, but instead must stretch across hardware to form an intelligent network, Huang argued.
“The thing that’s really exciting is that the computer no longer starts and ends at the server,” he maintained. “The computer in the future will extend into the network.”
Huang’s comments mark a fundamental recognition that the data center is a physical thing: the software that orchestrates data center workloads may be the operational driver; however, software needs to live on hardware, and without hardware there is no data center.
IT Procurement
The development of data center technology plays directly into related conversations around sustainable manufacturing, the greening of the data center, and the building of a circular economy through responsible IT asset disposition.
What goes around comes around, and there is certainly no lack of interest in IT procurement right now. According to Spiceworks research, 36 percent of organizations intend to buy new server hardware within the next 12 months, and a further 25 percent will buy servers within 12-24 months. Refresh cycles appear to be picking up pace, not slowing down.
With more companies considering new server hardware, the case for disposing responsibly of end-of-use data center hardware will grow. Enterprises are increasingly warming up to the importance of green IT, led by the OEMs.
Dell recently announced it has met its 2020 goals of recovering 2 billion pounds of used electronics across both consumer-facing and enterprise hardware.
“As one of the largest technology providers in the world, we have a responsibility to advance sustainability,” remarked Chris Fraser, Dell’s chief responsibility officer. “A big part of that is applying circular principles to how we design and ensuring accessible and responsible recycling for our global customers.”
Dell’s contribution to the recycling of used IT hardware is a welcome advance, but only flags the amount of progress still to make: according to UN figures, we produced 50 million tons of e-waste globally in 2018, and that figure is set to rise in the coming years.
Enterprises have a critical responsibility in bending the curve. Research from HPE Financial Services indicates almost a third of leading companies do not yet have an environmental sustainability strategy specific to their IT organization.
And where custom green IT strategies are in place, the focus must shift beyond initiatives to tackle power consumption.
“Objectives aligned to Circular Economy principles like reusing end-of-life products, remarketing idle resources, and extending the life of IT equipment should be integrated into IT sustainability plans as well,” the report observes.
With this in mind, data center operators should seek opportunities for IT asset recovery wherever possible, and proactively explore options for selling used servers, hard drive disposal, and other forms of IT asset disposition.
The greening of IT and the advent of the circular economy are key facets in a move toward a data center model that puts sustainability at its core. Whether undertaking a refresh cycle, planning a data center migration or preparing for data center decommissioning, companies will benefit from developing sustainable environmental practices.
Open Hardware
A surefast way of lowering the environmental footprint of the enterprise data center is through the move toward open hardware.
As computing architecture becomes more complex and diffuse, we are seeing growing consensus around the desirability of open source standards in hardware as well as software. For the most part, enterprises increasingly understand that establishing a global architecture that consistently delivers for end users requires sustained collaboration around open specifications as opposed to proprietary solutions protected by the threat of patent litigation. Interoperability around common standards is more important than ever.
The convergence around open standards extends equally to physical infrastructure, with companies such as eBay building their own servers to contribute to the open source community. Perhaps most prominent among these endeavors is the Open Compute Project, founded by Facebook in 2011 with a mission of setting common specifications for the data center.
Tellingly, the Open Compute Project Foundations projects an increase in revenue share for OCP gear to more than 5 percent of the hardware market by 2022. It is an open question where this revenue share will stand by the end of the coming decade.
However things shake out, one thing for sure is that data generation will continue to increase with breakneck speed and further balloon the market for storage, networking, and compute. According to IDC research, we’re looking at close to a six-fold increase in generated data between 2018 and 2025.
From every angle, the future of the data center for companies of all sizes is becoming more complex, of grander scale, and of increasingly critical importance, and these factors show no signs of abating in the coming years. Data management is no longer an IT support function: it is at the core of the enterprise itself, and the need for sustainability in IT procurement practices will only grow in its criticality.
