I just recently returned from the Consumer Electronics Show and was overwhelmed with the emphasis on the Internet of Things. I was there interviewing companies for the Data Center Industry Association for an upcoming webinars and had some interesting discussions on both the evolution of the data center and how IoT will impact.
Per Cisco, there will 50 billion connected devices by 2020. By then, the world’s population will be just under 8 Billion. That’s 6.25 connected objects per person. Data centers are not equipped to deal with that growth, at least not in their current form.
Think about it. That’s 50 Billion connected objects producing data. Fifty billion objects that need to be networked, and tied into applications to produce value. The implication for our storage, compute and networks (internal and external) will be overwhelming. The amount of applications that will be created and big data analysis that will need to occur in order to take advantage of all this information will keep programmers employed, and data center managers grey haired for the next decade.
If you thought the data center was getting complex now, just wait. Time to start rethinking the data center of the future. The one of today isn’t ready.
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