Data Center Trends to Watch in 2019

While the technologies is interesting to explore, it’s important to consider what is the driving force behind it.

As we look to the future, the concept of what data centers do and how the tasks in a data center are accomplished will continue to evolve. While mega data centers—on the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook—get the majority of attention, the corporate data center remains steadfast. It’s still chugging along and doing not just the tasks for which it was originally envisioned, but supporting IT workloads in new and interesting ways.

There will likely always be those technologies and business processes that an enterprise will want to hold close to its vest, and for that reason alone, the data center remains an important part of enterprise IT. But as technology changes, so does the data center, both in use and implementation. In 2019, we will see more of the same as well as pointers toward the data center of the future.

• Data centers are not obsolete, and in most cases, the legacy tasks they support are still important. However, the focus for those large facilities has, in many cases, changed. No longer the centralization of IT workloads, smaller data centers are being built in regional locations to bring services and compute closer to the customer.
• Many companies are moving to the cloud, but they still don’t want to give up control. Companies will use data centers to deploy private cloud infrastructures at a growing rate, with more than 28 percent of cloud spending being focused on the private cloud, according to IDC.
• While the traditional data center network operations center will remain important, the overall management structure will change to allow end-to-end views of data center operations as well as cloud-based services in both public and private clouds.

“Current data center discussions are partly wrong because they’re always about the data center,” Scott Sneddon, senior director and chief evangelist for cloud and SDN at Juniper Networks, told us. “The majority of technological changes in this space are happening because of the cloud. More precisely, multi-cloud. While the data center is central and necessary, it’s not sufficient on its own. In the new year, enterprises must extend the conversation and data center deployments out to the cloud on-ramps that exist closer to the user in either the campus or the branch.”