Data centers gearing up to harness IoT technologies

The IoT (Internet of Things) is a network of devices connected to the Internet that gathers and transmits data. The ubiquitous adoption of devices like smartphones, to cars, to refrigerators to connect to anyone, anywhere at any time is impacting the data center industry. The reason for this impact is that sensors and microchips are placed anywhere and is subjected to advanced analytics to give business a competitive edge. This increasing amount of data that is being produced by both consumers and providers will not only change the applications and devices, but also needs to manage efficiently. Here data center operators come into picture.

Let’s discuss this situation with an example: suppose a company is distributing millions of sensors along its production chain in several factories. The data send is all about machinery to a central location. The managers on one hand can access this large amount of data that can effectively contribute to help correct inefficiencies, and to create business value. But on the other hand, the company would probably very quickly reach its processing capacity, as it would be overloaded with data and connections that are being pushed from the sensors. It would not be technically and economically feasible for the company to handle this huge amount of data. Hence, they need to look for a robust data center.

Research firm Gartner estimates that the IoT will have 26 billion units installed by 2020 and, by that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300bn, mostly in services. The rise in IoT technologies has a potential to transform the data center market, as its deployment will create a large amount of data that will have to be analyzed and processed in real time. It will increase workloads on the data centers and data center service providers will face new challenges in the form of capacity, security, and analytics. So while data center owners recognize the challenges that are coming their way, they consider the rise of IoT as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Let’s find out how efficiently the data center owners can optimize their data centers to handle the increased workloads due to growth in IoT technologies:

Data center automation

Data center automation enables automating the servers, network and other data center management tasks like scheduling, monitoring, configuring, patching, updating and reporting. IoT technologies require agility and flexibility for applications or services to be run quickly, managed efficiently and securely. As per a recent survey by Juniper Networks, 80 percent of businesses experience network errors caused by human mistakes on a regular basis, while the number of errors averaging in a month is 5-6 in a non-automated network.

The data center operators have started focusing on automation to increase network agility and reliability while controlling OpEx and CapEx. Besides lowering costs, automation will also free the staff to do more strategic work, making them more proactive than reactive and will operate more efficiently, with fewer human errors.

According to Sayed Peerzade, Chief Information Officer at Reliance Big Entertainment, by incorporating smart technologies into the data center, facility managers will be able to keep track of real time status of components and environmental measurements to keep operations flowing smoothly. He said, “Sensors that measure temperature, humidity and electricity will be combined with network equipment monitoring to help data centers maintain a high level of uptime and reduce capital and operational expenditures. Data centers will have more platforms available to them, including IoT integrating data from many different sources to keep their computing facilities functioning at optimum capacity”

Store Valuable Data

A lot more data means a lot more storage will have to be provisioned in data centers. In addition to pure capacity, it is crucial to focus on being able to get and use data generated by the IoT cost effectively. Thus, the companies need to adopt innovative ways for optimizing storage capacity with better servers and newer compression technologies.

Joe Skorupa, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner once stated that data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT.

According to Gartner, backing up all raw data will probably be unaffordable. Also, it is virtually impossible to store all the IoT data generated. Thus, data center providers will have to look for more efficient ways to sort this data in real time to identify valuable data that must be stored and processed further.

High-speed, low-latency network

The inclusion of IoT will increase incoming traffic on the data center networks. The power of a data center is dependent on the network that interconnects it with other data centers as well as end devices. Sufficient levels of bandwidth must be made available to send data from the devices to the data center, as well as between distributed data centers to accomplish meaningful analysis.

After including IoT in the infrastructure, data will come from a multitude of sensors driving the need for more bandwidth. For example, in IoT applications like automated driving and logistics, huge amounts of sensor data are constantly being sent, received and analyzed by systems in the vehicle and data center. Once driverless cars become practical, data center networks will need to transmit the data in near real-time to manage traffic flow and prevent collisions.

Data center providers also have to provide highly reliable and low-latency networks to optimized IoT traffic and if not done it will have immense effect. For example, imagine if a patient whose vital signs are being constantly monitored by remote hospital staff could end up in a life-threatening situation if information cannot travel across the network in a reliable and timely manner. And not to forget healthcare sector is one of an important vertical in IoT adoption.

Robust security

In IoT technologies, tremendous amount of highly sensitive and personal data is being interchanged every day, which in turn present a number of security risks that could be exploited to harm both businesses and consumers. This data might include financial transactions, personal records, and corporate data that is often business critical and confidential. According to some web application security, IoT and smart home technologies are the most vulnerable technologies to attacks. This clearly indicates that security cannot be underestimated and data center providers needs to maintain a robust infrastructure to protect the data.

It is thus very important for the data center operators to properly design the security landscape to deal with the ever-growing range of cyber threats by in-depth defense for the network, servers, applications and end-points encryption. The security solution needs to be agile and should support automatic provisioning and deployment across the data center.

Thus, it is vital for data center operators to have proper planning and expansion plans in place to maintain an even workload caused due to growth in IoT technologies. They should in fact have started thinking about the best approach to optimize and innovate their infrastructure.

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Dan Scarbrough
Co-Founder - DCD Holdings