The internet has connected us all. It has made it possible for people and computers anywhere in the world to communicate. We want to be able to work from home or our favorite coffee shop, requiring access to all the same tools from home that have from our desk at work. We want to be able to play a video game at home in our living room as a team with other players located all around the world, all through the internet. We want to bring our mobile devices to work and use them for work and play.
These things are all possible and rely on data centers to make them happen. The more connectedness we require, the greater the demands we place on our rapidly aging cloud computing centers and their power and cooling infrastructures.
Changing Needs in the Workplace
More workers are bringing their own mobile devices in to work, and employees increasingly want to be able to work from home. Workers contribute to the IoT, demand mobility on the job, and companies are increasingly using cloud computing to handle big data jobs and even desktop applications in some cases. These changes place increasing demand on the corporate networks and data center usage.
Needs Are Rapidly Outgrowing Resources
The more we are connected, the more we realize we can do with our connectivity and the more we demand of our computing resources. We ask for more of our infrastructure daily and are beginning to hit the hard limits of some of the older centers. This will require major redesign projects for existing centers, and many new facilities to be built from the ground up in the next decade.
New Facilities Must Be Designed With the Future in Mind
As new computing centers destined to be nodes in the cloud are developed, they need to be designed with plenty of room for growth. As is always the challenge in the industry responsible for supporting the growth of technology, IT service leaders must anticipate where technology may be headed in the next ten years, and try to provide the infrastructure to support it. A good place to start will be to provide plenty of room for expansion of power supply, and state-of-the-art, energy efficient, adaptable climate control systems for the computer rooms.
The changing demands of the workplace include more personal mobile devices in the workplace, more employees working remotely, and the increasing use of cloud computing for mission-critical applications. These changes all put stress on our aging data centers, which will soon need to be updated to accommodate our growing communication and computing demands.
