Datacenters 2016 Outlook: Overshadowed by Cloud

IDC predicts that by 2017, 60 percent of datacenter-based IT assets that organizations rely on to conduct business and deliver services will be in colocation, hosting, and cloud datacenters. So, if cloud is all over enterprise IT, where does that leave datacenters? Russell Senesac, Datacenter Business Development Director at Schneider Electric, in one of the recent posts, wrote about how cost transparency in cloud computing is adding pressure on the datacenter business.

Earlier, the cost of running an application was diluted, but taking an application on the cloud can tell you exactly how much it will cost you. Senesac added that there will be more datacenter managers retiring than entering the market and also wrote, “Kids coming out of college are not going into facilities, instead are going into the IT side of the house.”

Since more cloud-based applications are being developed, datacenters are mostly used for mainly draining out of an existing investment.

Madhavan Kandadai, CTO at IndusInd Bank, lists typical problems of availability and flexibility while employing datacenters and emphasizes how cloud can actually solve many of these operational and elasticity challenges in an IT team. “As of now, in India, the cost of investment of maintaining a datacenter is still not quite justified and cloud service providers have only recently begun to setup datacenters in India with attractive pricing,” he added.

Adding to Kandadai’s points, Gaurav Sharma, research manager, enterprise computing at IDC, lists six major challenges when it comes to datacenters — skill sets, migration paths, space and power crunch, architectural challenge performance versus security, and rising costs and competition. While infrastructure is becoming more complex with a combination of cloud and tradition, specific skill sets for only datacenter infrastructure is becoming scarce.

Gartner analyst, David J. Cappuccio, in a conversation with Tech Target highlights the alarming scarcity of skilled IT professionals, shrinking budgets  and greater support demands as a huge disadvantage in the datacenter domain. Maintenance and availability of space is no longer that big of a concern in this field. Since more cloud-based applications are being developed, datacenters are mostly used for mainly draining out of an existing investment. But there are troubles, and big ones too.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in deploying datacenters is the cost of power supply for running and cooling. “I have several datacenters outside the city where electricity is unreliable and hence our diesel cost for generators becomes obscenely expensive,” laments Iyer. His problem is even more highlighted as a study by IDC states that 25 percent of all large and mid-sized businesses will confront significant power/cooling facilities mismatches with new IT systems, limiting them to using less than 75 percent of their physical datacenter space.

Essar Group has one of the largest cloud deployments. For Patil, the investment on datacenters in the last couple of years is fluctuating, primarily because other avenues in the same segment are easily available. He said that while enterprises may continue to hold on to their datacenters, because they are unwilling to move specific applications to the cloud, the fact that the legacy infrastructure is slower than the younger cloud infrastructure will always prove to be a sting by the side.

A study by IDC states that 25 percent of all large and mid-sized businesses will confront significant power/cooling facilities mismatches with new IT systems, limiting them to using less than 75 percent of their physical datacenter space.

“It will always be some on premise and some on cloud,” said Patil, “There will always be companies with quicker adoption to cloud, but enterprises will always have a bit of cloud, a bit of datacenters and a bit of hybrid.”

Where are we heading then? What will 2016 bring to the cloud of datacenters?