Data Centers Becoming More Efficient

Energy-efficient data centers will continue to demand attention in 2014, with high energy costs and government regulations and directives on measuring data center energy efficiency continuing to be prominent.

That’s the view of Herman Chan, senior vice president of marketing & general manager of DCIM (data center infrastructure management) at Raritan Inc., who discussed 2014 trends in CIOL.

DCIM provides valuable information on how to optimize data center power, cooling and physical space. Companies are embracing DCIM because information is readily available to help with capacity planning and troubleshooting, and to make informed decisions about equipment additions and changes.

Continued growth is expected in the nascent DCIM market, which may reach about $1 billion in 2016. Like most emerging markets, there have been many entrants, varied approaches and many views on market definition over the past several years.

Other trends observed are:

• Big data and cloud computing will continue to be the two transformational influences on data centers.
• Cloud spending will surge by 25 percent in 2014, reaching over $100B, says research firm IDC. As a result, there will be a dramatic increase in the number of data centers to support growing cloud players.
• The rising costs of energy, floor space, and operations and the increasing business demands on data centers will continue to drive the adoption of DCIM solutions that provide real-time visuals on what if going on in a data center -- including views of all the equipment supporting a service application.
• Running multi-million dollar data centers on spreadsheets and Visio have become impractical and ineffective as sites get larger and work processes get more complex. These tools can only take you so far in managing assets, capacity and change.