Data Center Predictions for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond
Looking forward to 2021, we see a year of hope and change, fueled by accelerating rates of innovation. The leading organizations of tomorrow will be those that take the lessons of 2020 and apply them to achieve things that were recently thought impossible.
In 2020, we saw not one, but two vaccines successfully produced. Vaccine development, a process that recently took decades, is now accomplished in months. This level of accelerating innovation will permeate every part of society as we move into a data centric world.
There are a number of factors driving evolutionary as well as revolutionary innovation acceleration, including these data center predictions:
- A requirement for the capability that everything can be done remotely.
- Virtual desktops will become the norm.
- Data growth, movement, storage, and processing will continue to experience exponential growth.
- NVMe-oF will become the storage interconnect of choice.
- Analysis of data is going to be done closer to the point of origin.
- Data Centers are going to become numerous, small and distributed. Centralized data centers will disappear as the AirBnB-ization of data centers accelerates.
- Dense and fast is going to become the critical requirement for infrastructure procurements.
- Cloud will continue to see new growth by those with the hope of zero data center initiatives.
- Consumers of public clouds will continue to be disenfranchised by unpredictable and ever growing operational costs, given increasing data demands.
- There is going to be a “De-cloud” effect, while the same operational fluidity will remain a requirement for any on-prem or edge datacenter.
- It should not be a surprise when public cloud vendors start buying up and maintaining the large data centers previously run by large corporations.
As we rise out of the pandemic, we are going to take the lessons of 2020 and evaluate new technologies at a rate that would have been unthinkable a year ago. People are going to be open to adopting new approaches to everything they do, fundamentally reshaping what they can accomplish.
If we look at the technology topics people are discussing, these are led by Data Analytics, 5G, and AI/ML. These are the technologies that will lead organizations to a data centric world and reshape expectations for what can be done.
Source: Image: World Economic Forum, Boston Consulting Group
A data centric world is one in which organizations will go from making decisions based on a point in time snapshot of their data, to one in which they are able to fully apply AI-based analytics to all of their data collected over time, enabling them to gain insights they never could have before. To achieve this, they will need to be able to move more data, faster, than is possible with the platforms of the last decade.
Pavilion powers these critical applications. The growth of data, the need for speed and the miniaturization of devices is something Pavilion has been a proponent of. This is demonstrated in the design of the HyperParallel Flash Array™, which is purpose built with a unique switch based design, that unlocks the power of NVMe. With the flexibility to deploy both traditional and modern applications on an infrastructure that suits existing applications (block, file, and/or object) and emerging technologies is what Pavilion HyperOS™ provides with the integrated Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform™. Together we encourage our customers and partners to innovate, adapt and accelerate into a brighter future.
Reach out today to talk to a systems engineer to discuss your specific design goals and objectives.
By V.R. Satish
CTO and Co-Founder