According to a study by Gartner, the Internet of things (IoT) has the potential to transform the data centre market, its customers, its technology providers, technologies, and sales and marketing models.
The research firm estimates that by 2020, the IoT market will comprise 26 billion units installed and the IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue over $300 billion, mostly in services. Over the next few years, IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data which needs to be processed and analysed in real time. Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centres with service providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges.
Gartner underlines that the enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly regarding security, data, storage management, servers and the data centre network, as real-time business processes are at stake. The research firm concludes that in order to address these challenges data centre 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.
