Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/760098
4 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com On the broader energy front, how- ever, the data center industry continues to remain heavily focused on power costs and availability. Public policy has a role, but the major factor is demand both for IT services and for energy more generally. "ere is likely to be continued efforts to drive efficiency of use at the hardware level," notes Mark iele. "e current av- erage utilization in the enterprise is under 20%, and in the large cloud providers it's near 50%, but at Google it's likely close to 70%. e data center facility is always an opportunity space, but the returns are rapidly diminishing. e other big space for improvement is the efficiency of design in apps and the more appropriate use of processors that fit the job at hand (e.g., GPUs for machine learning and FPGAs for images)." iot secUrity: reality hits e Internet of ings (IoT) was once parodied through hypothetical scenarios in which your refrigerator, for example, would one day be able to let you know you were low on milk, or perhaps even order that milk for you (or at least send a note to your smartphone). Appli- ances may not be that smart, but the grow- ing number of Internet-enabled devices did lead to (perhaps facetious) speculation that toaster ovens would soon be attack- ing major networks. Yet the October 2016 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that led to a partial Internet outage for some parts of the U.S. apparently used a large number of compromised devices to cripple a DNS host. e culprit devices may not have been toasters, but the effect was the same. e result was headlines that brought the IoT security dilemma to the fore; as these devices proliferate, particularly if their security is lacking (whether through slipshod design or user ignorance/lazi- ness), they create a virtual army ready to attack at the behest of a clever hacker. Unresolved, however, is the question of whether users—who are oen unreliable at just updating the security of their major devices, such as tablets, smartphones and PCs—have sufficient incentive to keep all their other Internet-enabled gadgets secure. Unfortunately, the likelihood of more and wider-spread Internet outages increases as more IoT devices connect. But the IoT and DDoS attacks are just one facet of security, a broad topic that captured headlines—and the attention of companies—throughout 2016. cloUds and living on the edge Traditional company-owned data centers continued to take a hit in 2016 in favor of the low-capital-expense cloud model. "Cloud adoption has unequivo- cally accelerated over previous years," said iele. "You need look no further than the increased growth and associated spending of the leading cloud providers. Several of these providers anticipate needing to triple their infrastructure by 2020." Demand is clearly increasing, but so is the desire of companies to focus less on IT and more on their core business. "It's also true that more and more CIOs/CEOs are of the mindset that they should get out of the business of building and operating data centers. e wave of companies looking at a wholesale move of applications to the public cloud and to the private cloud in colocation facilities is growing," iele added. But centralization of resources poses a thorny problem: consumers are scattered far and wide. As a result, because of mobil- ity, the IoT, and user demand for more and faster service, industry interest in so-called edge data centers has increased. ese small facilities could be little more than the size of a closet, yet they bring some of the necessary resources to urban and other areas where demand is high or users are distant from central cloud data centers. A perhaps necessary reaction to the cen- tralization of the cloud, edge data centers represent a concomitant decentralization, bringing resources closer to the people. moore's laW oBitUary? Although not everyone agrees, many technology watchers believe Moore's Law has reached the end, having made a rather spectacular 50-plus-year run. Much, of course, depends on the precise defini- tion of the "law"—particularly regarding the relationship of process-technology scaling and cost—but a growing number of individuals and companies are looking past shrinking transistors to other meth- ods to deliver faster computing. iele noted, "ere are some side effects of the slowdown in Moore's Law, and not all of it is bad. e good result is the greater focus on alternative processors that are likely to more efficiently meet specific applica- tion performance requirements. e bad is that those who still brute-force the x86 architecture against problems will find doing so creates difficulties in their data centers: rack density (power use) will go up, because you'll have to constantly add more processors to keep up with disk-I/O and networking improvements." In some sense, attempting to call the end of Moore's Law is a parlor game; semiconductor companies will continue to innovate, and customers will continue to weigh performance, size and cost as they choose processors and other chips. e pace of change may simply decline, or processor vendors may look for other means of improving their products. Data centers and other related industries will see a greater focus on architecture (rather than transistor size) as well as soware in the pursuit of higher performance. In effect, the decline of Moore's Law will lead, in a sense, to calls for smarter engineering rather than just more engineering. conclUsions Every year, trends ranging from the economy at large to the fine techni- cal details of semiconductor physics and manufacturing conspire to shape the world in which data center operators find them- selves. Among the most jarring events of 2016 may have been the surprising (to some) outcome of the U.S. presidential election and the Internet outage precipi- tated by an IoT-based DDoS attack. Other things have remained largely unchanged, yet still a major focus: IT spending, energy and efficiency, and the apparent demise of Moore's Law—and what the future of processing chips will look like. Of course, other trends have been important through- out the year, including soware-defined everything, the various aspects of data storage and analytics, and the growing role of machine learning and artificial intelli- gence. e intersection of so many factors always keeps the industry interesting. n