The rise of the micro-data center

The recent 451 Research London conference threw up some interesting thoughts on how data centers might develop over the next few years, where micro-data centers – down to and including the ‘Bring Your Own’ variety – could play an important role.

Some interesting thoughts came to the fore during the recent `Business of Cloud, Data Center and Hosting Summit’ run by analyst firm 451 Research. While the background was painted from sets of figures based on solid research of trends in cloud usage across the cloud services marketplace, the best thoughts were of the still-arguable, ‘we-reckon…’ variety.



Such ‘blue-sky’ thinking is, of course, essential fuel for the planning every CIO needs to have permanently underway, though it is often secondary to the grist needed for the everyday mill of keeping the lights of IT burning.

So one of the highlights of the event was when two of the company’s founding fathers, Distinguished Analyst John Abbott and Research Vice President Andy Lawrence, sat down head-to-head to kick over idea of where IT may be heading.

In fact there was little blood spilt as they largely agreed on the trends they see coming down the line. Those trends, however, do highlight a broader range of options for CIOs to consider, especially when the wider connotations of the often ill-used ‘hybrid cloud’ tag is the subject at hand.

That tag, for example, seems to get used – especially by vendors – to define a straight forward divide between doing everything on premise, even if it is all cloud-delivered, and everything ‘out there’ in hosted, public services. The latter, of course are then defined as gargantuan organizations where the service requirements of even the largest enterprises are seen as reasonably insignificant.

One consequence of such thinking is that both concepts – the enterprise data center or the huge resources of AWS, Microsoft and Google – lead to what is effectively a ‘lock-in’ of sorts. The investment needed in either, as capital investment or long term contract commitments, can seem to degrade the potential for flexibility that the cloud offers.

Read More: http://diginomica.com/2016/04/11/the-rise-of-the-micro-data-center/