The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade.
Although the billions of endpoints or connected “things” will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the data centre will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential.
According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), installed service provider data centre capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.
“Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the data centre will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context,” says Rick Villars, vice-president: data centre and cloud at IDC “Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the data centre itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices.”
Without question, IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger data centres, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that data centre capacity ends up residing in service provider data centres.
Additional findings from IDC’s research include the following:
* IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge;
* The growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that hyperscale data centres are a major component of most IoT service offerings by 2019;
* IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks; and
* Service providers will adopt IoT technologies (Smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own data centre assets (smart data centres).
The IDC Special Study, Impact of Internet of Things on Data Centre Demand and Operations, analyses the growing impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on data centre demand and operations at a worldwide level. The study discusses the key use profiles that are shaping deployments of IT assets from edge to cloud in support of IoT offerings.