Emerging technologies and disruptive business strategies are reshaping the very fabric of the datacenter. This article from Netmagic highlights 7 technology trends shaping the next gen DC Datacenter in 2015.

1. 7 Technology Trends Shaping the Next
Generation DC
Article by Nitin Mishra
 Datacenter
The datacenter industry has been witness to a steady growth rate evident from the
investments being made for facilities as well as IT infrastructure. Globally, the industry is
growing at a rate of 10-12 % and is further expected to grow at an annual compound rate of
about 17% over the next few years, according to recent analyst reports. Good news indeed
for the industry.
Talking about the APAC market, the datacenter spend in the region is considerably higher than
the global average. While China takes the overall lead in the growth within the region, both
China and India will see large investments in building new colocation facilities. At the same
time, mature markets such as Australia and New Zealand will see a decreasing trend in building
new facilities. The focus in these markets will be on datacenter consolidation.
Changes are predicted for the Indian datacenter market too. India has the world’s third largest
internet user base after US and China, which is estimated to grow by over 15% in the coming
years with respect to both white space and power. It is predicted that by 2050, India will become
the 5th largest datacenter market in the world.
In 2015 there will be an increased focus on and importance of BYOD, big data, Internet of
Things and cloud services. Consequently, we will see more companies, both small and big,
opting for managed datacenters rather than captive datacenters. There will be high demand for
datacenter colocation services over the next two years.
Trends Affecting The Datacenter

2. IDC, in its recent report, stated that the number of datacenters being built around the world will
continue growing until it peaks at 8.6 million in 2017, and estimates that the amount of
datacenter space worldwide will grow from about 1.58 billion square feet total in 2013 to 1.94
billion square feet in 2018.
Datacenter has since long become the backbone of businesses. Having said that, in the coming
years the sheer growth in data, and digital intelligent devices of all kinds will drive profound
global growth in datacenters. Here are some trends that will be seen in 2015:
Increased Focus On Disaster Avoidance
Strategies related to disaster avoidance and business continuity will gain prominence in the
coming years. We are seeing a heightened awareness of possible failures among business
enterprises in the context of both man-made and natural disasters. In 2015, planning for all the
possible disasters will continue to grow as a top priority for organizations prompting enterprises
to lay special emphasis while choosing the locations, building designs and standards. Datacenter
trends will change due to this newfound focus on disaster avoidance.
Emergence Of Software-Defined World
Over the past few years, we have been seeing the emergence of software-defined servers
(virtualization), software-defined networking and software-defined storage with respect to
datacenters.
In a software defined world, the whole idea of defining a physical infrastructure with software
abstraction is to decouple the control of computing with the actual infrastructure, so that
computing can be assembled on-demand from available components. This makes provisioning,
scaling, management, deconstructing out-of-use computing, all very easy.
In 2015 and beyond, datacenters will need to gear up to support this software-defined world.
Despite standards and guidelines for effective use, best practices are still evolving and will take
another 2-3 years to mature.

3. The Move From ‘Captive Datacenter’ To ‘Internet
Datacenter’
Increasing complexity in IT infrastructures poses a challenge in managing the power and
cooling requirements if the captive datacenter operates on old DC equipment. Technology
refresh times and the cost of technology upgrade are also some concerns relating to captive
datacenters. Internet datacenters on the other hand are equipped with the most recent
technology upgrades and are managed by experienced personnel.
In 2015, we will see many organizations move from a captive datacenter model to Internet
datacenter (outsourcing model of Datacenter) model because of Zero capital investment, high
operational efficiency and scalable infrastructure that an Internet datacenter provides.
Web-Scale IT will Change IT Landscape
Lets look at ‘What is Web-scale IT’ first. To define it in simple words, it's all of the things
happening at large cloud services firms - such as Google, Amazon and Facebook - that enables
them to achieve extreme levels of compute and storage delivery.
Till now business enterprises have been grappling with budget constraints, a need to minimize
inefficiencies and the increasing demand for business agility to make their infrastructures more
efficient and responsive to market changes.
In 2015, due to web-scale IT, organizations will move to the next level of infrastructure
automation, the level that understands the requirements of applications and responds to those
requirements in real time – a software defined environment. With web-scale IT, datacenters will
have to scale performance proportionally with the addition of resources, adapt to the needed
degree of business change, remain resilient in the face of infrastructure fragility and be
operationally efficient as the size of the system grows.

4. Datacenter Density Is Heating Up
The last 10 years or so have been all about increasing datacenter density i.e., speed and
computing power in a datacenter. Computing has changed with processors containing more
cores, memory capacity has become bigger and faster, proliferation of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)
ports has changed networking environment, and higher capacity solid state drives (SSDs) have
become ubiquitous. The result is that the datacenter has become smaller in size and
performance has increased.
Big Data, Big Changes And Datacenters
Big data has been spoken about in datacenter circles as a game changer - business decisions
depend on accurate and timely data so datacenters in coming years must rise to that challenge.
In 2015, big data, with all its computing and storage needs, will be driving the development of
storage hardware, network infrastructure and new ways of handling ever increasing computing
needs.
Internet Of Things Is Disrupting The DC
One of the biggest disruptions that is about to happen is the Internet of Things (IoT).
Proliferation of sensor devices sending data by the second to a cloud backend and being
analyzed on real-time via big data analytics is definitely changing the way datacenters are being
perceived – a disruptive change in the DC.
Reports from various analyst firms are touting from 18 to 50 billion devices connected by 2020
– all sending back data every second or so. The DC is going through burgeoning changes in the
way it looks, functions, performs and perceived!
In Conclusion
Emerging technologies and disruptive business strategies are reshaping the very fabric of the
datacenter. However, the importance and spends on the DC continues to increase and will reach

5. a point when most datacenters will either be managed by expert datacenter providers or will be
completely outsourced to managed datacenter players.