Holland Barry, Senior Vice President and Field CTO; Cyxtera.
While the outlook for the global economy looks a little off slow in 2024, the overall trend line for the data center industry looks positive. Why; One reason is Generative AI (GenAI). We’ve already seen GenAI drive higher investments in data centers and we expect this trend to gain even more momentum.
In fact, I expect 2024 to shine a bright light on IT infrastructure. In recent years, organizations have kept their existing infrastructure a little longer than normal. It is now aging and poses a business risk. As they embrace GenAI, businesses will need to upgrade their infrastructure to optimize performance.
This change will require new technological approaches. Interest in liquid cooling will continue to grow, while organizations may recalibrate their costly reliance on the public cloud as they adopt more cost-effective hybrid solutions. Let’s take a closer look at some of the trends we can expect in 2024:
Artificial intelligence is becoming real and will positively impact data center operations
Will artificial intelligence change the world? Absolutely. Has already. During 2023, organizations did a lot of experiments, applying AI to different data sets. In 2024, companies are going to become much more intentional about how they use AI to solve very specific business problems.
For example, data center providers will increasingly use artificial intelligence solutions to improve operational efficiency and sustainability by monitoring and setting optimal limits for factors such as temperature, humidity and overall general energy consumption. AI tools can also improve the security posture of data center operators and their customers by more proactively notifying them of data center security events or alerting the data center NOC and/or SOC to issues related to network congestion or potential breach.
There is so much potential with AI, but I predict that early experimentation may fall short of expectations (as it often does). It will take some time to find the rough diamonds and usually, the more specific the use case, the more positive the result.
In addition to investing in AI, organizations must also invest in upgrading and hiring staff to integrate and operate the technology to better achieve their desired business outcomes. Today the industry is anemic when it comes to AI experts. As organizations gain more clarity on how to deploy AI to solve specific business problems, we can expect them to invest in more AI training for their teams.
Data center racks should pack more power
While we predicted that rack data centers would need more power in 2023, this it happened even faster than expected due to the rapid growth of GenAI and higher density deployments, as well as more demanding general purpose computers (CPUs) coming to market. And rack density will only increase in 2024. Data center providers will need to leverage advanced cooling technologies and consider new design schemes to keep pace with next-generation technology.
Interest in liquid cooling technologies will increase, but short-term investment will be modest (for now)
It’s no secret that air cooling has its limitations, especially as we look at higher density development. That said, air still meets the cooling needs of many applications, and while the evolution to liquid cooling is certainly gaining traction, rapid uptake may take a few years due to the initial investment and complexity involved in deploying these solutions in the current data center infrastructure.
Today, only the most sophisticated businesses and service providers have these technologies in production. However, interest is skyrocketing and adoption is becoming easier and more common as new solutions and innovative approaches debut. We’ll see definite growth in this segment in 2024, but look for a sharper rise down the road once there’s more technology standardization and OEM support.
Slow but steady will win the cloud recalibration race.
In 2023, many organizations experienced financial pain to have gone “all in” in the public cloud in previous years. Now they realize they may need to make some changes, including migrating some workloads to a private cloud or going back to on-premises.
While we’re seeing a move toward cloud recalibration, I don’t think it’s happening at the volume or speed that we thought it might, given the complexity. But we are start to see big brands make the move, and they do provision of books and measurable cost savings that other organizations can learn and follow. It has gone beyond a theoretical game.
While public cloud will continue to grow, adoption will be more selective in 2024 as organizations increasingly adopt hybrid solutions and cloud-like options such as bare metal as a service (BmaaS)that give them the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud with the cost predictability and control of a private offering.
Proximity to data will grow in importance
As it specifically relates to artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing, data in most cases, especially for AI training, wants to live very close to the computation. In the past, organizations were eager to get their work started, so they decided to spin it up in the public cloud and figure it out later—which often led to costly decisions down the road. Now is the time for some organizations to figure out how to move workloads back to a private cloud setup or purpose-built AI clouds for performance and cost efficiency gains.
conclusion
Looking back at mine predictions for 2023, a prediction that will certainly carry over to 2024: AI/ML spending and adoption will increase despite macroeconomic headwinds. GenAI presents a huge opportunity for the data center industry to act as a broker and catalyst for technological change and innovation. Like Forrester Research recently famous, “Dynamic changes are occurring in the technology infrastructure landscape due to changes in business requirements affecting the data center, remote work, edge environments and connectivity.” This is an exciting time to work in data center operations and I look forward to navigating these changes together.
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