The importance, role and functionality of data centers will change over the next five years, leaving many organizations unclear on how to plan their future data center architectures.
Research firm Gartner said technical, fiscal and service delivery concerns will be critical and organizations should plan around eight forces to shape their best data center strategies.
“Over the next five to 10 years most organizations will need to change their approach to previous data center strategies used in the last five to seven years, as most of the world comes out of recession and the Nexus of Forces (social, mobile, cloud and information) affects technology use,” said Rakesh Kumar, research VP at Gartner.
Gartner has identified eight areas to consider when developing a data center strategy that balances cost, risk and agility.
The next few years will bring significant enhancements to process architectures and the economics of processor and memory components will change. In-memory computing, where the primary location for application data is the main memory of the computing environment, will become more widely used, helped by ever-cheaper DRAM and NAND flash memory. At the same time, the use of low-energy processors in servers will increase, with the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption costs.