Future of Data Centers

This past summer I had the opportunity to work for Prudential in their New Jersey Data Center with their Infrastructure management team.  In this position I managed the physical facilities systems within the data center as well as the actual installations and decommissions in the data center while also maintaining the software side to provide visual management of space, power, cooling, and data center capacity.  This job was great work experience and also vastly increased my interest in data centers and how they operate. 

With great increases in data volume and more and more devices being connected to the internet each year more pressure is being placed on data centers to expand.  Technology company, Cisco, predicts that within the next 5 years 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet.  Within this time frame the number of applications will rise quickly and data center traffic will greatly increase.  This is pushing enterprises to spend more and more on technology and growing the IT market.  Data centers have seen major changes over time as computers and servers have become smaller and built to store more data.  Now with everything becoming virtualized, virtual servers and recent innovations to create virtual storage area networks (VSAN) are changing the data center game.  Virtualization is helping to increase flexibility in data centers while allowing for easier system backups.  Working with other teams I got to see first-hand how virtualization is being deployed in data centers and how the technology is rolled out.  Cloud solutions is something we have become very familiar with and as it becomes more secure and cheaper to implement, data centers are turning to being primarily cloud-based.  Another particularly interesting advancement in data center operations and being seen in large companies like Google is the use of artificial intelligence.  Artificial intelligence was being used to ultimate create a more energy efficient data center.  Something I was closely involved with is the field of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM).  DCIM brings together the disciplines of information technology and data center facility management systems.  DCIM is a growing field in data centers that helps those working in the field manage and visualize the actual infrastructure while optimizing the efficiency of all systems. 

While there have been vast changes in data centers over the years it is interesting to think about what the data center of the future will be with technology constantly improving.  Creating this data center of the future to keep up with growing demands for more data and productivity will without a doubt put companies ahead of the game providing customers with improved flexibility.