Popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) will add about 26 billion units plugged to internet over the following five years, creating new challenges for data centre and opportunities for tech firms dealing with that market.
According to Gartner’s latest report, vendors and service providers of IoT will score incremental revenue of over $300bn over the period, with the majority generated by services.
Gartner research director Fabrizio Biscotti said that IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need 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, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges," Biscotti said.
Connecting remote assets, IoT offers a data stream between the asset and centralised management systems. Assets could further be included into new and existing organisational course to provide information on factors such as status, location and functionality.
The report added that real-time information would make a more accurate recognition of status possible, as well enhancing utilisation and productivity through optimised usage and more precise decision support.
Gartner vice president Joe Skorupa said that the enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data centre network, as real-time business processes are at stake.
"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," Skorupa said.
According to Gartner, potential challenges include security, enterprise, consumer privacy, data, storage management, server technologies and data centre network.
Furthermore, the report added that the scale of network connections and data related to the IoT would speed up a distributed data centre management approach which requires providers to offer efficient system management platforms.
"IoT threatens to generate massive amounts of input data from sources that are globally distributed. Transferring the entirety of that data to a single location for processing will not be technically and economically viable," Skorupa added.
"The recent trend to centralise applications to reduce costs and increase security is incompatible with the IoT.
"Organisations will be forced to aggregate data in multiple distributed mini data centers where initial processing can occur.
"Relevant data will then be forwarded to a central site for additional processing."
This new architecture would also challenge existing operations staff, as they have to manage the complete environment as a homogeneous entity as well as monitoring and managing individual locations.
"Data centre operations and providers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management platforms that can include a data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) system approach of aligning IT and operational technology (OT) standards and communications protocols to be able to proactively provide the production facility to process the IoT data points based on the priorities and the business needs," advised Skorupa.
"Already in the data centre planning phase, throughput models derived from statistical capacity management platforms or infrastructure capacity toolkits will include business applications and associated data streams," Biscotti added.
"Those comprehensive scenarios will impact design and architecture changes by moving toward virtualisation, as well as cloud services.
"This will reduce the complexity and boost on-demand capacity to deliver reliability and business continuity."
