Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/207723
Data Center/IT Year in Review A s in previous years, 2013 saw a mixture of trends and hype in the data center and IT industry, with software-defined networking, big data and the cloud among the hottest topics. Peppering the landscape is the NSA, which deservedly found itself at the heart of a major international scandal following leaks by Edward Snowden regarding the agency's broad foreign and domestic spying programs. In the financial realm, the industry overall saw a modestly positive year, although ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty continues to take its toll. The confluence of a number of technological, societal and economic factors, however, are pushing the industry toward various turning points that could materialize over the next few years. Hot Industry Trends The biggest story of the year for technology, barring any unforeseen events as 2013 comes to a close, has been the NSA spying scandal. The agency's surveillance programs have brought concerns surrounding security, privacy and government snooping to the fore, implicating technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as willing (or not-sowilling) accomplices. The scandal, which continues to break as more revelations leak out, is driving a number of consequential trends, not the least of which is a painful blow to U.S. cloud providers. According to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), "The U.S. cloud computing industry stands to lose $22 to $35 billion over the next three years as a result of the recent revelations about the NSA's electronic surveillance programs." Efforts to www.datacenterjournal.com by JEFFREY R. cLARK PhD maintain customer trust, promote security and privacy despite government surveillance, and counter the shroud of secrecy around intrusive government requests for information will continue well beyond this year as technology companies and their customers grapple with the implications of the government's shadowy actions. A related topic is big data, which is among the top candidates for overhyped trend of the year. The temptation of finding valuable nuggets of information lurking in the reams of data that companies collect has brought out many dubious claims from vendors looking to cash in. Concomitantly, it has also raised a number of privacy worries as individuals and groups consider whether the mountains of information and huge data centers to process it mean that every aspect of life is now a matter for public consumption. Storage for the masses of information remains a concern, and companies are increasingly turning to solid-state drives (SSDs) in place of hard-disk drives (HDDs). Because of the price premium on SSDs, however, most deployments will be hybrid in nature, relying on SSDs for data requiring the fastest access times and HDDs for less-used data. Moore's Law marches on in semiconductor technology, delivering faster and more-efficient processors, but the end for exponential silicon-manufacturing improvements may be nigh. Unsurprisingly, 2013 saw its share of predictions regarding the end of Moore's Law; although past prognostications have proven false, eventually one will be right. At the 2013 Hot Chips conference, the director of DARPA's microsystems group, Robert Colwell, predicted that Moore's Law will run out of steam around 2020 at the 7nm node or so. Notably, his prediction focused on econom- ics, not technical barriers, as the limiting factor. Chief Product Architect John Gustafson of AMD has expressed similar sentiments. Data center operators may not care about such predictions, but the growing concern is raising questions about what directions the industry will take once it can no longer rely on regular semiconductor improvements to drive greater processing capabilities. Talk of software-defined networking and the software-defined data center has abounded in 2013. Pinning down exactly what is meant by these terms is a little bit difficult, however—much as big data and the cloud have been subject to all manner of definitions. Part of the difficulty is the abstraction layers that describe the process in a network: separation of the data plane and control plane is one aspect of SDN. If you're not privy to the technical details of networking, SDN may sound like just a bunch of tech jargon. Like most hyped technologies, however, software-defined this and that will likely find their place in IT—just not as a cure-all. Trends continuing from previous years include the cloud, which is driven in large part by mobile mania. As both consumers and employees increasingly rely on mobile computing, cloud-based services have a growing role. Furthermore, as companies weigh their IT options, the cloud offers a tempting alternative to building capital-intensive data centers. The centralization of the cloud into the hands of a few providers—as opposed to highly distributed data centers all contributing smaller amounts of service capabilities—is problematic. MIT's Technology Review notes that "in the worst case scenario, a cloud could experience a full meltdown that could seriously threaten any business THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 3