The data center industry is constantly shifting and evolving. And that’s why it’s of utmost importance for those in the data center and colocation industry to stay up to speed on the latest trends. Where macro trends in the data center market often make the most impact is through shifts in data center management, and the way data center managers ensure their facilities are as efficient as possible.
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A new whitepaper from Server Technology focuses on four of the top challenges today faced by those responsible for designing, operating, and sustaining the IT and physical support infrastructure found in today’s data centers. Those macro trends, laid out in a recent article by Steve Gillaspy of Intel, include hyper growth and hyperscale, hyper density, new workloads, and new hardware. These trends are also connected to many of the concerns for data center managers in 2019, 10 of which are outlined in Server Technology’s new report.
The report breaks these concerns down into four categories: design, installation and configuration, operation, and upgrade and retrofit. And many of these concerns are directly tied to recent trends and developments and new technology. For example, as hackers continue to become more and more of a threat to data, maintaining security from external bad actors seeking to disrupt or disable the data center operation is top of mind for today’s data center managers.
Another one of the biggest data center management hurdles today is that data center managers are being called to run much larger, more complex workloads that are often very different from one another. Hardware requirements can vary widely from workload to workload may also change over the course of a day or even an hour.
It’s apparent the macro data center trends of today are keeping data center managers on their toes as they tackle challenges like provisioning hardware for new applications, identifying where there is available power capacity, facilitating the automation of the data center to minimize both headcount and downtime and more.
The concept of “Software-Defined Everything” (SDE) is one of the most talked-about trends in the evolution of data center design philosophy.
So, how does the industry mitigate some of these pain points for the data center managers of 2019? Server Technology points to the concept of “software-defined everything” or SDE, which also happens to be one of the most talked-about trends in the evolution of data center design philosophy.
Think of software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage (SDS), and software-defined data centers as part of a general movement towards “infrastructure that decouples the bare metal that executes point data transactions from the software layer that orchestrates them,” the report explains.
Instead of individual elements of compute, storage and networking, SDE sees infrastructure as a “set of resources” joined through software.
Back in 2015, anticipating many of the aforementioned trends and pain points, Server Technology introduced one of the first intelligent rack PDU in the data center industry to support mass customization of outlet configuration, power density, feature set, and colorization. The report explores the company’s High Density Outlet Technology (HDOT) family of rack PDUs through the years. And Server Technology’s new HDOT Cx is designed to provide further flexibility and convenience in the data center cabinet.
Download the new report from Server Technology, “Top 10 Concerns of Data Center Managers in 2019,” to explore some of the biggest challenges and trends in data center management, as well as how to solve these hurdles.