Moving to Extremes

Computer manufacturers are seeing precipitous declines in PC sales, while mobile and tablet makers are booming. The same computer manufacturers are selling high end data center technology such as servers, storage and dynamic I/O management devices at a growing clip. This trend is mirroring what is happening to data center facilities: the market is shifting to the extremes.    

As cloud computing and whatever-as-a-service grows in popularity, the mid-size enterprise data center is slowly disappearing in favor of off-site infrastructure solutions. The economies of scale in larger data centers will make it more and more attractive for CIOs and IT departments to migrate to colocation, managed services, or full blown cloud services for a majority if not all of its IT workload.

At the same time, technology is shrinking and workloads that used to be supported by large populations of server-filled racks are now being performed by virtual servers in a "cloud" of shared IT resources comprised of virtual hosts, virtual storage and dynamically allocated bandwidth on a shared fiber backbone. Mid-market companies and regional offices of large multinationals can now be supported on a few high density racks. It doesn't make economic sense to have a highly trained staff capable of supporting a large data center for just a few racks, and it doesn't make sense to have general facility staff unfamiliar with the importance of critical technology trying to manage and maintain up-time. 

So, technology growth is spreading to the extremes. Workloads offloaded to the cloud will be housed and supported in bigger regional mega-centers offered by Dell, HP, IBM, Amazon, Google, Digital Realty Trust, QTS, Rackspace, Ragingwire and others. At the same time, in-house populations of high density ultra-efficient IT cabinets will be housed and supported in scalable data center modules or containers. These containers will be provided with an integrated infrastructure including power, cooling and monitoring and conveniently located in an adjacent or nearby site.

Gartner and others are predicting data center growth in equipment sales, power consumption and workloads at a 10-14% compound annual growth through 2020, or doubling in size. However, the distribution of this growth will occur at the extremes, with high end IT equipment in large cloud campuses, or high end IT equipment in small modular data centers. The appetite for modular mobile tablets and smartphones are driving demand for high end app servers - either in large cloud data centers, or in small modular containers.