The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a disruptive technology that has the potential of changing the way we live in this world forever. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, there will be approx. 20 billion Internet-connected things, from smartwatches to smart offices generating traffic to communicate. Central to facilitating communication between these things are the Data-Center’s required to store and process the data that IoT devices will generate. The DC infrastructure facilitates applications such as analytics and customer-oriented applications allowing companies to extract value from data that is produced by IoT devices. While DCs provide an essential part of the jigsaw in supporting IoT, Gartner reported that current DC architectures are not prepared to deal with the scale, volume and heterogeneous nature of data that IoT will bring and will face as a result significant challenges in dealing with workload demands in terms of the storage, compute and network requirements to support IoT. Given this challenge, DCs in the future need to be designed and developed bearing IoT in mind. However, the design of a DC is a non-trivial task, and a thorough understanding of the workload demand of IoT applications is required to build a workload model that describes how the DC performs at its busiest time under load. Such models are essential to: design and optimise the management of resources in the DC; and facilitate performance analysis and simulation allowing DC providers to evaluate the impact that configuration changes have on QoS requirements.
