What to expect in 2015: Trends in the data center

The end of the year is the traditional time of summing up and thinking about the trends of the near future. In today's article we will discuss some of the trends in the data center world, which are noted in their research by specialists from companies such as Cisco (and other experts).

The Internet of Things gets to data centers

The Internet of Things (IoT) and “Internet of Everything” (IoE) is a global trend that in the coming years will not bypass the data centers. This is well illustrated by the statistics :
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• By 2020, 30 billion devices will be connected to the network, and the amount of data generated by the “total Internet” will be 403 zettabyte (ST) per year by 2018 (in 2013 there were 113 ST).
• By 2018, IoE devices will generate twice as much data as end users transmit to data centers; this number will be 47 times more than total data center traffic.
• About 2% of the data generated by IoE devices will eventually reach data centers (this opens up opportunities for increasing data storage capacity).

Data streams

In 2015, more than 90% of all Internet traffic will be in video (including HD and 3D) - this will affect what data will be transmitted to and from data centers.

Next year, data center traffic will exceed five zettabytes, and 76% of this data will not leave the data center walls - thus, internal traffic will be the largest segment among all information transmitted. However, the traffic between data centers will increase, and its growth rate by 25% will exceed the rate of increase in traffic exchanged between end users and the data center or internal data center traffic.

Data centers will increase and decrease

Many Western experts agree that the next year will be marked by a change in the size of the data center. At the same time, there will be a trend towards the consolidation of large-scale data centers and the reduction of the area of ​​small data centers. This is how Kevin Leahy, Dimension Data expert, describes this situation.

Small corporate data centers will strive to reduce the occupied space, large colocation service providers will only grow.

Cloud technologies play a big role in reducing corporate data centers. A year or two ago, business representatives thought about whether they were ready for the introduction of clouds or not. Now this question is no longer worth it - now the business is thinking about how to benefit from new technologies. What to transfer to the cloud? How quickly can such a migration take place? Organizations that ask themselves such questions overestimate the expenditure of resources on maintaining their own data center, including thinking about saving physical space, often as a result it decreases by half.

At the same time, large data centers continue to grow. These companies invest heavily in cooling and energy saving technologies, so the efficiency of using the physical server's computing resources in such data centers is much higher than a private company can achieve in its own data center.

The development of public and private clouds

Cisco experts in their report “ Cloud Index Report ” highlight a few facts related to the development of cloud technologies:

• In 2015, 70% of the total load will come from cloud-based data centers, and their traffic will grow four times faster than traditional data center traffic.
• By 2018, more than three quarters (78%) of the entire load will fall on cloud data centers, and only about a quarter (22%) on traditional ones.
• Download public clouds will grow 50% faster than private - by 2018, 53% of Internet users (2 billion people) will use personal cloud-based data storage services (in 2013, this figure was 38% or 922 million people).
• By 2018, 31% of cloud load will come from public cloud data centers (in 2013, 22%), and 69% to private cloud data centers (in 2013, 78%).

Continuing the penetration of virtualization technologies

One of the main factors that will facilitate the migration of workload from traditional data centers to cloud data centers, is a significant degree of virtualization of the latter, are convinced in Cisco. Virtualization allows you to dynamically allocate resources to the needs of the business.

In addition, virtualization leads to an increase in server load density - this figure for cloud data centers will increase from 5.2 in 2013 to almost 7.5 in 2018. At the same time, for traditional data centers, the increase will not be so significant - from 2.2 in 2013 to 2.5 in 2018.

IPv6 Penetration

Another Cisco document titled “ The Zettabyte Era - Trends an Analysis ” specifically noted the fact that in 2015 IPv6 penetration will continue. Asia and Europe have already used up their dedicated IPv4 address pools, and in North America, Africa and Latin America, free addresses will run out between 2015 and 2017.

According to Cisco estimates, by 2018 there will be 10 billion devices (stationary and mobile) supporting IPv6 in the world (in 2013 this figure was only 2 billion).



According to the IPv6 support organization, called the World IPv6 Launch Organization, back in April 2014, many major operators and Internet providers introduced IPv6 and reported an increasing amount of traffic using a new technology: on the Verizon Wireless network, it amounted to 49%, the French Free Telecom announced about 37.52%, Rumanian RCSand RDSat about 24.86%, AT & T - about 17.88%. We in 1cloud are also planning in 2015 to introduce support for IPv6 into the infrastructure .

Appearance of public APIs at data centers

The development of clouds leads to the emergence of technologies that make it more convenient to use clouds for business tasks. One of these tools is the public API for interacting with data centers. With this technology, you can connect various applications and physical platforms that can be located at different points in space.

Such integration can be carried out at the infrastructure level (distribution of cloud resources), application level (for example, integration with the CRM cloud and ERP systems) or service level (integration with databases, messaging systems, portals, etc.). Also, since organizations rarely work with a single data center or cloud service provider, there may often be a need to integrate these separated services — and here the public APIs also come to the rescue (in 2015, 1cloud will have its own API, which we will do separate topic for Habr).

That's all for today! Thank you all for your attention, we will be happy to answer questions in the comments.