Emerson Network Power unveils Data Center Trends for 2016

“The industry continues to advance at an unprecedented pace. While many businesses remain cautious about making significant changes to their IT infrastructure due to economic uncertainty and the desire to extend the life of existing facilities, we are seeing innovation on many fronts and the potential for major transformation in the industry has never been more real,” said Steve Hassell, President of Data Center Solutions, Emerson Network Power.

Cloud gets complicated

Most organizations are now using cloud computing to some degree. The evolution from SaaS to true hybrid environments, in which cloud services are used to bring greater agility to legacy facilities, continues to advance as more organizations move to a bimodal architecture. Rather than stabilizing, however, cloud could get more complex. The latest server utilization research, conducted by Stanford’s Jonathan Koomey and Anthesis Group’s Jon Taylor, found that enterprise data center servers still only deliver, on average, between 5 and 15 per cent of their maximum computing output over the course of a year. In addition, 30 per cent of physical servers are “comatose”, meaning they have not delivered computing services in six months or more. The push to identify and remove comatose servers will continue to build momentum and is an essential step in managing energy consumption. However, the potential for unused data center capacity to become part of a shared-service, distributed cloud computing model will also be explored, enabling enterprise data centers to sell their excess capacity on ...Read more