Data Center and Edge computing trends for 2021

Data centers are the building blocks of our online world. Therefore, they must innovate and implement the latest available technologies in order to respond to the digital needs of the post-pandemic world. Here are some trends that will shape data centers in the near future:

Sustainability

Devastating wildfires and powerful hurricanes around the world highlight the urgent need for climate action and safeguarding data through these disasters. The Uptime Institute writes “Regulators, watchdogs, customers and others will increasingly expect operators of digital infrastructure to provide hard and detailed evidence of carbon reductions, and water savings.” According to Data Center Dynamics, “The industry seems to be rising to the challenge with commitments to becoming carbon-neutral or even negative widespread among hyperscalers and operators.”

Colocation becomes more important

Enterprises will continue to outsource to data centers because they can quickly adapt to changing capacity needs without the burden of managing the full stack of IT and applications. Customers now expect more than just renting some rack space, so a data center must offer advanced tools that are not available in a self-hosting environment such as technology, interconnections, software tools, services, and application environments.

Edge computing takes shape

Edge computing will play out over many years. Several of the largest players in digital infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and American Tower are shifting into deployment mode and possess the resources to make a huge impact on edge computing and how it evolves. This will generate opportunities and responses from other players. A sustainable edge initiative is the company EDJX, which is implementing software-defined power technology that results in new efficiencies to power management in data centers.  

Automation has become necessary

With automation, data centers will have smaller operations teams, even as the volume of servers continues to climb. Facebook, for instance, has created a Site Engineering Robotics team to design and develop robotics solutions to automate and scale Facebook’s data center infrastructure operations. Edge computing has brought new levels of sophistication to software automation in data centers.

In the Cloud

Data center infrastructure has boosted the rise of the digital economy. This trend will continue as cloud computing has become a standard. After the launch of the first affordable public cloud services, many companies have migrated some of their data to the cloud. 2021 will bring an accelerated adoption of cloud-native technologies for not mission critical operations.

Data based monitoring

Data centers that leverage the power of a data-driven intelligent monitoring system enjoy multiple advantages over the competition. Their servers have superior uptime, while operators can understand their infrastructure better and tweak it for optimal performance.

All these trends add up to more demand for data center infrastructure – bigger, faster, available everywhere and ready to scale.