Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/611691
4 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com B rian George, Principal of Critical Facilities & Specialty for architecture and design firm Corgan, summarized 2015 as being somewhat vanilla: "Perhaps the only surprise was that there were no real surprises. It has been an evolutionary year, not a revolutionary one." He added that "certainly individual companies have major projects that they would consider their major and notable successes, but across the entire industry it has been pretty much business as usual." Nevertheless, a number of underlying trends are nudging the data center world in this or that direction. So, in rapid-fire format but no particular order, here's a look at what was important in 2015 and what may well shape the trends for 2016 as well. energy in foCus As the fuel of the data center—as well as its biggest expense—energy remains a hot topic. In the past year, however, the oil price fell further on both a supply glut and declining demand. Although oil isn't the fuel of choice for data centers (except in emergencies when diesel generators provide backup power), this curious situation raises the spec- ter of increased taxation and, perhaps, regulation of energy. Regardless of those factors, which are beyond the control of individual companies, efforts to improve efficiency are ongoing, since they can decrease operational expenses regardless of energy prices. But many of the easy pickings in the efficiency orchard may already be gone. "Economization continues to be the focus as designers continue to reduce PUE," said George. "As the industry makes progress, each incremental improvement becomes more challenging, and we've made significant enough gains to make ad- ditional improvements noticeably harder to achieve." Overall, the major task at this point isn't so much squeezing the last few hundredths of a point from the PUE of a major data center run by Google or Ya- hoo, but instead getting smaller operators to implement more of the standard tech- nologies that bring major improvements. California Drought highlights Water ConCerns e ongoing severe drought in California has increased awareness of water usage—including in data centers. "e highly publicized and dramatic drought and water scarcity problems we have seen have provided a clear signal that relying on evaporation for cooling may be a strategy that carries some risk, so more clients are requesting that we give them options that don't require water consumption," said George. On the bright side, however, water consumption overall in the U.S. leveled around 1980 or so and has even shown some indications of a major decline according to U.S. Geologi- cal Survey data. Per-capita water con- sumption fell some 40% between its peak in the 1970s and 2010. So, even though usage of this scarce resource is a concern, the situation is less dire than some might indicate. Nevertheless, guzzling water for running computers seems wasteful, and it's another point of potential failure for a critical facility, so the industry is likely to continue moving away from it or to find alternatives, such as using non-potable water, where possible. the Dying enterPrise Data Center? e ability to dispense with the costs, planning and other hassles of on- premises data centers is an increasingly attractive quality of the cloud. e num- ber of companies turning either partially or entirely to cloud IT services has led to speculation that the enterprise data center is dead. Although the past year may not have initiated this trend, it seems to have accelerated it. "We think 2015 has pro- vided more confirmation that the general trend away from enterprise-owned and operated data centers is continuing and will continue," George noted. "e general recovery of the economy and generally strong profitability of enterprises has not translated into broad interest in getting more invested in the business of building and operating their own facilities. e Internet/cloud providers are building robustly, so that speaks to their confi- dence in that market." An acceleration of the trend toward centralized resources is therefore ongoing—along with the con- comitant dangers of keeping all the data center eggs in just a relatively few baskets. seCurity e biggest overall story for 2015 may well have been security. High-profile breaches such as the U.S. Office of Person- nel Management—which compromised the personal data of millions of govern- ment employees, including those with se- curity clearances—have raised awareness of the dangers and consequences of falling prey to hackers. Unfortunately, however, the path forward is uncertain. Security is a growing concern among company executives, but their challenge is to find an effective, affordable approach to combat- ting malicious parties. Data centers will remain a focal point in this matter; the only question will be whether the trend toward more and bigger breaches will accelerate. internet of things e Internet of ings (IoT) has been the subject of tremendous hype over the past year, with some companies mak- ing arguably outlandish predictions about its potential revenue and societal impact. Clearly, the presence of powerful yet inexpensive processors enables a number of applications that were previously either impossible or prohibitively expensive (e.g., wearables, widespread sensors and so on), but whether companies and consumers have an appetite for processing everywhere remains to be seen. For data centers, the question will be whether they are prepared for the possible flood of new data, including real-time communications as well as information that must be stored and processed. Also, security may be a deal breaker unless both vendors and cus- tomers have the will to make it a priority. softWare-DefineD everything A popular buzz phrase of 2015 is soware defined. From soware-defined