Bridging the gap between IoT and Asset Management
An IoT World
By Sean Gately
Fast forward to today’s explosion of smart devices and the Internet of Things and you and see that data centers infrastructure management is under a dynamic change. The core concept that data centers have been focused on since inception has been to centralize IT operations and management for cost efficiency and predictable operations.
With 50 Billion devices set to come online by 2020, and more deployed devices getting “smart”, much of the centralized structure of a traditional data center becomes inadequate because of the massive amount of data created at-the-edge, and the need for real-time edge-based decisions. User and machine-generated content cannot affordably be sent to a centralized structure and now requires pre-processing at the edge of where the data is being created.
This has lead to machine learning, modular and edge data centers and the creation artificial intelligence to support critical edge-based decisions in real-time. Being able to process and implement decisions in a live edge environment is critical to how operations need to operate, which has forced a dynamic change in the data center.
The need for Data Centers to branch from a centralized structure into decentralized edge-based architecture is driven mainly by the physical impossibility and monetary inhibition of being able to transport such massive amounts of data to a centralized location locally or in the cloud, as well as the need for near-instant application support and device management at location.
Clearly, there is a shift in perception toward the need for interconnectivity between IT assets, with more devices coming online and communicating, the need to create and understand a mesh of networked distributed computing devices will be relevant if not critical impact on future data center management.
As your infrastructure reaches out to past critical IT systems into an ever-growing list of communicating devices, the ability to monitor locate and understand these devices and how they interact with each other and what impact groups of devices have on systems and services will be needed to operate your environment in a new data center 3.0 (smart data center) IoT world.
This dynamic shift in use case has pushed data centers to the edge and created a more distributed and intelligent data center environments. The advance of artificial intelligence has allowed machines to learn from their own data as and how they relate to other machines around them. This ability to utilize human-built algorithms will phase many of the mundane human interactions out and replace them with the machines ability to use data for intelligent decision making.
Continued, Bridging the Gap
