The data center industry is one that is characterized by dynamism, rapid growth, and changes. With ever-growing emerging new data needs among organizations, changes to better the industry are always inevitable. With changes always taking place in how technologies are used and valued within the enterprise, major shifts have taken place and will continue to do so in future.
Many organizations have changed in how they view, build and plan their data centers due to change in bandwidth needs. The organizations are migrating new data centers to leased co-location facilities and public cloud. There are numerous reasons why there’s an emergence of new innovative data centers. The focuses of many organizations have shifted from just data storage and disaster recovery, and the focus is now primarily on data analysis and data processing for on-demand access. The latency requirements that are being experienced due to the rise of mobility and wearable technology have never been seen.
From service providers and co-location perspective, there is large growth in the provision of distributed computing. Therefore, data centers need to be more efficient and achieve higher density. This is also bringing up and increasing the need for peering between service providers.
The popularity of the ‘Internet of Things’, is another major driver of the expansive data center growth. Construction of more data centers is expected as the need for more efficient data centers is on the rise. As we know, data centers are mega operations, there is an emerging question. Where are we supposed to put them all? Quite a number of innovative teams have worked tirelessly and have come up with some unique data center solutions. Their priorities are the optimization of physical space and making resources more available in a more reliable and steady manner. Some of them include:
Microsoft’s Project Natick
As cloud computing continued to grow in importance, it transcended its original intention. It was more than just giving access to data anywhere anytime, but it has become a major factor in economic growth. Project Natick invention major priority was to bring data center resources as close as possible to the users who need it most. Nearly half of the world’s population resides near large water bodies, hence data center construction in the ocean made sense. This was a genius thought as deep ocean water offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources and above all a controlled environment.
Nautilus’ Floating Data Centers
Floating data centers is another mind-blowing innovation which supports everything you need in mechanical and electrical infrastructure and installs it to a floating barge directly. The mission, just like the Project Natick, was to bring the resources as close to the users as possible while still allowing operators to have a controlled environment. Giving operators access to a heavily controlled environment prepares them better to meet the demands of the next decade or even more.
We have seen many companies trying to take strides over the innovation of more efficient and reliable data centers. The only expectations are that the future is holding more mind-blowing designs of data centers.