Data Center Transformation to Accelerate

By Jeffrey Schwartz

Many once feared that cloud migration would one day result in the demise of on-premises data centers for enterprises and MSPs. Instead, digital transformation and the shift to cloud architectures have fueled more demand for data center capacity than there is supply in recent years with the shift to hybrid infrastructure.

During the first half of 2022, data center construction of 1,913 megawatts (MW) in the U.S. exceeded last year’s total, almost tripling year over year, according to the latest research from JLL, a global real estate investment company. Construction in APAC and EMEA has also accelerated.

Amber Schiada, JLL’s head of Americas’ data center research and author of a report based on its findings, noted: “Operators are expanding to catch current and future market needs in the increasingly digital world. The biggest problem around the corner is how to generate enough power for these newly developed sites.”

The power problem is a near-universal concern among business leaders. According to results from a Gartner survey revealed in November, 87% of business leaders said they plan to increase their sustainability investments during the next two years.

Sustainable technology is one of six trends Gartner predicts will impact data center infrastructure and operations (I&O) in 2023.

“From improving the sustainability of data centers and the cloud to embracing the IT circular economy for devices, I&O can promote sustainable technology by improving efficiency and performance of infrastructure assets,” Gartner research BP Jeffrey Hewitt said in a statement.

Sustainability is now a crucial factor in data center design, according to Schiada.

“Collectively, these spaces in the U.S. account for approximately 2% of the total U.S. electricity use,” she noted. “As a high energy-consuming sector, the industry has been proactively working toward sustainable operations.”

Higher Rack Densities

Until recently, large data center power densities have remained relatively consistent, typically in the range of 4 kilowatts (kW) to 6 kW cabinets, according to a recent report by the Uptime Institute. But a shift to more compute-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data simulations has pushed up those requirements.

According to Uptime’s report, almost 40% of organizations that operate data centers with more than 5 MW said their densities are accelerating rapidly. At the same time, organizations that don’t require higher power capacities stick with what they have for more extended periods.

Organizations often stretch out the life cycles of their infrastructure beyond the recommended span of three to five years. Back in 2015, Uptime Institute’s research showed that only 34% of respondents kept their servers in production for more than five years. In 2022, that figure rose to 52%.

Secure Access Services Edge (SASE)

Another major trend Gartner predicts will drive data center investments is the implementation of secure access service edge (SASE). Gartner has defined SASE as a single-vendor product that enables digital transformation by securely connecting users, devices and locations, allowing the users to access applications from any site.

SASE spending in 2023 of $9.2 billion will grow 39% over 2022, according to Gartner.

“Hybrid work and the relentless shift to cloud computing has accelerated SASE adoption,” Hewitt noted. “SASE allows users to connect to applications securely and improves management efficiency.”

Gartner advises data center teams implementing SASE to select single-vendor solutions and an integrated approach.

Data Center Modernization

Expanding hybrid cloud infrastructures and moving to continuous integration and delivery will drive more use of unified application resource management (ARM), application performance monitoring (APM), digital experience monitoring and digital platform conductor tools, according to Gartner.

Organizations will increasingly implement industry cloud platforms. Gartner forecasts that by 2027, more than one-half of organizations will have deployed industry cloud platforms.

Software-Defined Data Centers

Organizations transforming their data centers in 2023 will typically invest in software-defined data centers (SDDCs), according to Sagenext, an MSP and hosting provider in Augusta, Georgia. According to a recent blog, MSPs like Sagenext are migrating to SDDCs and looking to lower their infrastructure requirements.

“In an SDDC model, virtualization technologies recreate the computing powers and storage in software form,” the author wrote.

Edge Computing 

Organizations continue to become more distributed while the number of connected devices at each location continues to rise. Increasingly, relying on traditional centralized data processing architectures becomes too expensive and results in unacceptable performance levels. The latter is especially problematic for latency-sensitive applications and operations.

Edge computing solutions address both issues by processing the data before it passes through the network.

“The edge is the physical location where things and people connect with the networked digital world,” Gartner VP and distinguished analyst Thomas Bitman said at the research firm’s I&O conference this month. “Edge computing is part of a distributed computing topology where information processing is located close to the edge.”

But edge computing solutions will only be effective if implemented properly. According to Bitman, one-half of edge computing solutions deployed through 2025 without an enterprise edge computing strategy “will fail to meet goals in deployment time, functionality and/or cost.”

Hybrid Cloud

Organizations are increasingly implementing hybrid infrastructures. Sagenext maximizes the capabilities of both public and private clouds.

“The private cloud offers excellent control and security, while the public offers expansive computing powers,” according to Sagenext, noting the same is true for MSPs. “With a hybrid cloud architecture, service providers can keep and manage critical data and resources on secure private servers and move them to a public server for different processing requirements.”