It seems that technology and geopolitics are going to force data centers to undergo significant changes in the near future.
Because of the technological advances that we have seen in the recent months and years, it may be surprising to know that data centers continue to face challenges in the near future, but here are the realities.
- More data to pay attention to. For many years, the explosion of data has been the top most concern for all data centers. The year 2015 would be an interesting year as we see and realize how the Internet of Things, sensors and wearable computing, as well as other technologies that gather copious amounts of data, would impact data centers.
- There are two factors that would be interesting to note in 2015. These factors could speed up the changes in the data center industry, and it could have both positive and negative effects on data centers as a whole. One is the increasingly intense competition among traditional data center vendors. Traditional data center vendors have, until recently, been partnering with each other. But that will soon change as these vendors are looking to expand their product lines. For example, long time partners Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard each introduced competing products. Cisco came up with United Computing System in 2009, which effectively puts it in competition with HP. Meanwhile, HP acquired 3Com and began to offer more networking products. It would be easy for a major vendor to introduce a new product or start a price war. The increased competition could very well expedite the changes in the industry.
- Then you have the tensions between China and the West. China has been known to subsidize high technology companies in their country to help them become more competitive against their Western counterparts. Meanwhile, lawmakers in the United States has been very vocal about their distrust of Chinese products, thinking that smartphones from Huawei, devices from Lenovo, and other Chinese made products would provide a way for the Chinese government to hack into government networks in the country. You might think that US companies would opt for an onshore data center for their needs, or get their infrastructure from US vendors. However, China is strengthened by investments, well-known and profitable brands such as Lenovo and Huawei, along with China’s strong electronics market and Taiwan’s equally strong ODMs. All of these factors would lead to more people opting for Chinese products in the data center infrastructure industry.
- Further, you also have the rise of support for white box makers and open source software. Remember Edward Snowden? Snowden released several secrets that involved several big multinational corporations, leading to most people perceiving them as not worthy of their trust. For instance, Snowden has revealed that Cisco, Dell and other vendors in the country might have helped the US government spy on their targets by coming up with compromised systems. Because of this, most buyers will now avoid large companies with their proprietary infrastructure and instead opt to work with smaller data center infrastructure vendors and white box providers.
What do all these mean? If you have a data center to support your business, you need to be very agile and know your future requirements as well as being able to scale in order to meet these requirements.
So what can you do? Call Four Cornerstone and talk to us about your data centers. We can help ensure that you are future-proofed when it comes to your data centers and that you are ready to surpass these challenges.
