Role of data centres to evolve under shifting IT currents

At one level it will be business as normal for the data centre in 2017, with continued virtualisation of workloads, legacy integration and the seemingly, endless quest for greater performance and capacity.  
Beyond that, however, increasing acceptance of the public cloud as a key component of digital transformation will present hard-pressed IT departments with a completely new set of challenges - as will growth in Big Data, the Internet of Things, process automation and other technologies increasingly seen as essential to the digital business going forward.
One of the biggest shifts in 2017 will be a move away from a focus on computational power, to addressing the storage side of the equation, largely driven by Big Data applications and the tidal wave of data analytic tools that began to flood the data centre in 2016.
On the hardware front, this will accelerate the already brisk march towards flash domination over conventional magnetic storage, with enterprises adopting all-flash architectures to both improve performance and eliminate silos. Year 2017 will also see vendors bring a number of disruptive new technologies to market, such as NVMe and 3D XPoint, able to deliver data at DRAM-like speeds but at flash-like prices.
 
The end of the data centre?
The mix of platforms that enterprise IT will need to embrace will increasingly include the public cloud. For some, this signals the end of the corporate data centre as we know it, as the complexity of building and managing an on-premise infrastructure outpaces the ability of the IT department to contain it. However, the enterprise is unlikely to give up the data centre without a fight and there are clear signs that a hybrid approach will not only prevail throughout 2017, but become the de facto standard for enterprise IT going forward.
And lastly, there are clear signs of steps being taken to tackle the inherent complexity of the hybrid approach, both at the infrastructure, application and business level.
On the infrastructure side, the virtualisation technologies so successfully applied to the management of computer resources are now being extended to do the same for storage and networking. Products and technologies are maturing rapidly, with 2017 set to be the year that the software-defined data centre (SDDC) finally becomes a reality.
There have been great strides too when it comes to managing application workloads and, by leveraging data analytics, the development of sophisticated business-level automation tools. Heralding, perhaps, the start of the much anticipated “utility” era of enterprise IT, these tools will enable organisations to define in pure business terms the policies by which they want their digital systems to be monitored, managed and measured.
More than that, they can then be executed by smart software regardless of the platforms involved - whether in the on-premise data centre, on externally hosted private clouds or public cloud services - to deliver the IT the businesses want, wherever and whenever they need it. 
Thawipong Anotaisinthawee is country manager of Nutanix (Thailand).