Datacentre investments critical to Internet of Things rapid growth says research firm
The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade, including the datacentre according to a research firm that is warning more investment is required if the IoT is to fulfil its potential.
Although the billions of endpoints or connected ‘things’ will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the datacentre will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential said IDC. According to IDC, installed service provider datacentre capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.
Said Rick Villars, IDC vice president, datacentre and cloud: “Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacentre will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context. Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacentre itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices.”
Without question, IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacentre, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that datacentre capacity ends up residing in service provider datacentre.
It added that the growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that hyperscale datacentre are a major component of most IoT service offerings by 2019.
IDC’s research also showed that IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute and storage deployment at the edge. IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks, so service providers will adopt IoT technologies (smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own datacentre assets (smart datacentre).
