2016 was a rollercoaster of a year with new technologies and upsets causing stirs within the market. The year saw the rise of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) into the mainstream consumer and business market, Brexit and the knock-on impact this has had on business confidence and the ever-growing technologies underpinning the data center. But what does 2017 hold and how can data center managers and technology businesses capitalize on these changes?

Unreal tournaments?

Virtual and augmented reality really came into the mainstream in 2016 with the global success of Pokémon Go. Its rise wasn’t a smooth journey with delays in the UK due to server overloads causing great angst amongst consumers. The hype surrounding the app opened a whole new market for data center providers realizing the vast opportunities behind the latest mobile craze. Operators with sufficient server capabilities, adequate cooling and high enough power capabilities are in an ideal position to enable game users and developers to provide increasingly sophisticated, data hungry games.

Next year is likely to see a slew of new VR and AR games that will be just as data hungry, or more so as the technology develops. Data center operators that are able to offer substantial power capabilities are set to benefit the most, thanks to their reliability in ensuring consumers are not left with slow games.

Brexit worries

Brexit caused uncertainty the world over, politically, economically and socially. While the markets have now leveled, the uncertainty around the negotiating positions of the UK and the EU are causing hold ups in several areas. For the data center industry, however, the impact to date has been limited. Large technology companies have continued to invest in the UK data center market. Just recently, IBM confirmed it would build four new data centers in the UK, along with Amazon’s commitment to the sector and Equinix’s £26million expansion of existing sites. Smaller providers are more likely to feel the pinch when Article 50 is finally triggered sometime in the new year and the real negotiations begin, but until the politicians play their hands, much is still unknown – for now it is very much business as normal.

New look data for data centers

Data center 2.0 has been a talking point in 2016 with issues such as high performance computing (HPC) the Open Compute Project (OCP), hyperconverged infrastructure and software defined data centers (SDDC) featuring more heavily amongst providers’ offerings. The desire to provide faster, more efficient centers to power the data hungry technologies that are coming through are promoting changes to the traditional structure and design of facilities. By offering HPC, data center operators can provide high power levels typically reserved for research facilities and government organizations, enabling industries such as the gaming sector to be more confident in a sites ability to provide secure power during high demand.

The availability of open source hardware, without the legacy constraints of typical data center hardware, courtesy of the OPC is enabling data centers to be more efficiently designed. Access to customized server racks that can support higher densities typically seen in HPC helps data center operators to attract the latest technologies, such as VR and AR developers.

Hardware such as hyperconverged infrastructure is also continuing its rise in the data center. By combining storage, network and compute infrastructures, typically taking up vast amounts of room within the server rack, data centers can condense their footprints into more manageable, efficient systems. This impacts not only the space within the data center, but also the cooling requirements and power levels being offered.

Software defined data centers are placing more emphasis on a sites’ capacity to develop DCIM solutions to manage the data center 2.0. A site offering some of the new technologies discussed above needs a robust DCIM offering in place to effectively manage and control all elements of the data center. As more technologies, whether it be VR, AR, cloud computing or social media, come to rely more heavily on the data center, effective infrastructure management is vital.

Cloud and social

Existing technologies like cloud computing and social media are going to continue growing in importance as they do every year, but will become more reliant on the data center to support them in their growth. Over 200 million people joined social media platforms between 2015-2016, there is no reason this is going to stop in 2017 and data centers must be able to provide for this.

Greg McCulloch is CEO of Aegis Data, a company that provides colocation services to the London market.