Datacenters are the beating heart of the digital age. Without them, there would be no Internet. Therefore, whether you’re a CTO or just interested in the future of our online world, the following trends and predictions are worth knowing about.
Modular Data Centers Adoption Is on the Rise
For a while now, we’ve heard a lot of talk about modular data centers, yet there hasn’t been much in the way of adoption. 2016 is finally starting to see that change and a solid prediction for 2017 is that this will only continue.
Thanks to concepts like CenterCore, “modular” no longer has the negative connotation it has had to struggle against for years now. In 2016 and beyond, “modular” will mean scalability, speed to market and accelerated depreciation.
Wholesale and Retail Colocation Will Merge
For years now, the line that separates wholesale and retail colocation has been blurring. Most would probably agree it was defined at about the 1MW capacity threshold. However, wholesale is now offered all the way down at 250kW. Managed servers are becoming more and more common from these companies too. These managed services are offered to customers who sign increasingly large deals well into the range of multi-mega wattage.
The Industry Is Going Green
Earlier this year, Switch announced it had become the largest colocation data center in the world to go 100% green. This is a part of a larger trend that has been going on well before 2016, but it’s going to really explode during 2016.
A big problem with these datacenters trying to go green is simply that the infrastructure to provide the required energy isn’t there. Datacenters guzzle electricity around the clock and that won’t change as the industry continues to grow.
However, Switch and the state of Nevada have shown the world the playbook. By working together, Switch was supplied with resources required – local utility companies – to power their datacenter with clean energy.
Water Consumption Is Becoming a Problem
Unfortunately, water conservation is an environmental issue that datacenters continue to struggle with. The drought that struck California in 2015 made this abundantly clear. Datacenters need water to operate. At the same time, there’s no lack of industries that also need water, to say nothing of actual people and animals.
Yet water is the most heavily subsidized and underpriced utility in the United States. How datacenters make use of it is going to come to a head next year or shortly thereafter. Therefore, datacenter designers will need to create more efficient ways of handling this precious resource.
Colocation Is Growing in Popularity
One extremely easy trend to mention is colocation. This form of hosting simply offers too many advantages to be ignored. Though it has taken a while for less IT-savvy companies to catch on, that’s definitely changing. Colocation is growing by leaps and bounds and increasingly pushing out the old way of doing things. Even CenturyLink recently began selling off their datacenter operations in favor of offering colocation.
Competition Will Increase
At the moment, there are hundreds of colocation providers all over the world. Though the majority of them are located in North America, there is very little revenue concentration amongst the biggest providers. This is good news as it means there is still plenty of competition out there, which is great for the market.
You can expect this to continue into 2017. There have been no serious signs of consolidation amongst any of the big players. At the same time, we’re seeing more and more companies joining the industry.
As you can see, the datacenter industry is extremely dynamic at the moment and there’s no reason to think that’s going to change as we enter 2017.