As Data center operators battle the challenges associated with reduction of operational costs, without compromising with the Quality of Service (QoS), a spur in the growth of digitization initiatives, aligning with the ambitious government projects including ‘Digital India Programme’ is expected to further generate enormous demand for storage in the country. To tackle the mounting challenges of security, agility and scaling up of IT frameworks, Data Centers are witnessing rapid transformations as per the industry experts, with new disruptive technologies being integrated in Data Center environments to achieve maximum efficiency. Here are some top emerging Data Center Trends which will dominate the year 2016-: Flash Storage is the next big thing The year 2016 will witness a higher adoption of Flash based storage as compared to traditional Hard Disk Drives which come with a limitation of 10,000 rounds per minute (RPM). ”We have named the year 2016 as the year for all flash as businesses continue to demand for low latency and higher Input Out Operations Per Second(IOPS) for an unparalleled consumer experience. The shrinking costs of flash storage will further drive the demand for the technology,” said Abhijit Potnis, Director, Technology Solutions, India & SAARC, EMC. Converged Infrastructure Converged infrastructure, which involves bundling of critical IT components including storage, compute and network devices by a single vendor will witness greater adoption in the current year. The rise in its demand will occur in a bid to reduce operational costs as well as simplify the management of IT architectures by data center operators. ”Converged Infrastructure is transforming the data center space. While earlier the customers used to talk separately to compute vendors and network vendors, converged infrastructure has come as a one stop solution for their end to end requirements. It is also designed for scaling up where in thousands of nodes and multiple appliances can be added to an existing IT structure,” said Potnis. Fibre Channel for mission critical applications Fibre Channel will continue to exist and evolve, serving as the default network option for mission critical applications. ”All important transactions including airlines, banks, mission critical applications are utilzing fibre channel. Fibre channel network has always been evolving along with storage and servers and offers performance and scalability,” said Swapna Bapat, Director for Systems Engineering, Brocade. Automation Data center management operations will increasingly become automated to improve operational efficiency and minimize human errors. IT administrators will have to embrace new skill sets as the latest technologies are embedded in data center environments. To ensure a flawless integration between old and new technologies in a data center, IT decision makers will also have to undergo exhaustive training sessions.
