Enterprise investment in data center hardware is influenced by demand from hyperscale companies, such as AWS, Google, and Facebook, as well as from colocation providers

FREMONT, CA: Increased options for customers’ data management and growing demand for solutions that serve specific workloads will soon dominate the market for IT infrastructure equipment.

Data centers

Data center hardware comprised of computer servers, storage systems, networking switches and routers, and converged infrastructure appliances. A significant trend that will shape the adoption of data center hardware will be investments in hardware specifically designed to support next-generation workloads, including high-capacity Ethernet switching and GPU-equipped servers and storage systems.

Private cloud

The application of private cloud solutions will remain significant over two years, and competition between private cloud vendors will also be intense. Private cloud proffers a wide array of benefits such as improved IT resource efficiency, cost reductions, security, and the ability to gain more control over workload performance, safety, and compliance.

Silicon Photonics

Pluggable optics for networking use silicon photonics where the new packaging reduces manufacturing and cost, leading to increased importance in the data center industry. Companies such as Cisco, Intel, and Macom are investing in photonic circuitry for networking, and for use either on die for chips or interconnects on circuit boards.

High-Performance Computing

Solutions from HP, Cray, Fujitsu, IBM, and others merge traditional desktop computer CPUs with specialized storage and connectivity resources in a large computing group. HPC will snowball over the coming year, acknowledging probabilistic styles of computing in response to the increased demand for complex workloads such as AI modeling at scale.

AI optimized data center platforms will become a competitive market sub-segment over the next two years. Several platforms will integrate AI capabilities as part of the overall solutions, while others will make use of the latest processing technologies and hardware accelerators to support workloads with high-performance requirements.

Edge Computing

Edge computing infrastructure will take various forms, including microdata centers, dedicated edge servers, IoT gateways, and data management platforms, as well as hyper-converged infrastructure for edge deployments. 5G will be both a driver and an enabler of edge computing.

Big Data

Big data platforms allow companies to ingest, process, and analyze massive amounts of data from a wide range of sources. Vendors will invest in solutions such as Dataproc to move discrete, splintered data storage to a unified platform.

Virtualization

Virtualization involves the creation of virtual pools of computing, storage, and networking resources that are linked with but separated from the underlying physical hardware. Virtualization software providers will offer solutions to help enterprises transition from rival technology platforms to their own.

Containers

Policy-based applications have become containerized and orchestrated through Kubernetes technology after cloud computing introduced a new application development and delivery economy in the form of platform services.

With applications responding to continuous integration, continuous delivery (CICD), it will present numerous opportunities along with complexities associated with moving containerized apps into production with the help of open-source software (OSS) technologies such as Istio service mesh, Prometheus monitoring, and other “sidecar” projects.

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