Enterprise data center architecture is in the midst of the most dramatic change in decades. Hyperscale data centers have pioneered the software-defined data center (SDDC) on industry-standard hardware.
Energy Management
Energy is one of the top costs of data center operation. The 2017 data center will see accelerated adoption of energy-efficient flash storage. By 2017, more data centers will be co-locating with power plants to utilize their inherent redundancy, eliminate transmission cost and avoid the need for backup generators.
In addition, data centers will be more closely integrated with the electricity grid as part of a "smart grid."
Power cost will become one of the determinants of where to place a workload across geo-distributed infrastructure, arbitraging the fluctuations in local power cost driven by electricity demand patterns and the variations in supply introduced by greater dependence on solar and wind power.