How IoT is Transforming Data Centre Management

Gartner estimates that IoT will have 26 billion units installed by 2020 and by that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300bn, mostly in services

IoT is a scenario in which objects and people are able to transfer data over a network and talk to each other without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. With its emergence in the technology domain a huge quantity of sensors will get connected to the internet.Unfortunately, this connection might lead to a major workload on the data centre. Even Gartner recently estimated that the rise of IoT will require a rethink of data centre capacity management to cope with gigantic augmentation of data.

The IoT technology can be incorporated into new-fangled and existing organizational processes to offer real-time information on status, location, and functionality. The real-time information provides perfect understanding of status, and thereby it boosts operation and efficiency through optimized usage and exact decision support.

In a recent IoT conference, Joe Skorupa, VP, Gartner, said, “The most problematic issue for data centers is management of security, servers, storage and network. Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT.”

The IoT for data center chiefly indicates a lot more incoming traffic. These days, WAN links in data centers are intended for “moderate” bandwidth necessities of human interaction with apps.

A huge amount of bandwidth is required for that data which appears from a multitude of sensors and that data will be spawned by enterprises and user devices. The devices will craft more data as long as they continue to learn and know about the users. In fact, a lot more data will mean a lot more storage and that will have to be provisioned in data centers. In addition to pure capacity, companies will have to focus on being able to get and use data generated by the internet of things cost-effectively.

Skorupa further said that “IoT threatens to generate massive amounts of input data from sources that are globally distributed. Transferring the entirety of that data to a single location for processing will not be technically and economically viable”.

“The recent trend to centralize applications to reduce costs and increase security is incompatible with IoT. Organizations will be forced to aggregate data in multiple distributed mini data centers where initial processing can occur. Relevant data will then be forwarded to a central site for additional processing,” he further added.

Due to network bandwidth and backup storage capacity, data backup will turn out to be stickier. According to Gartner, it might be exorbitant to backup all the raw data together. This implies that companies must have a proper selection of data backup, and have to decide accordingly, as to which data is important. The mechanization of this procedure will develop into another big data hurdle of its own.