Business owners ask a lot of their IT infrastructure. As the economy continues to lag, many are looking to do more with less by getting what use they can out of their existing systems.
At the same time, most businesses recognize the need
to be both flexible and current to remain competitive. Today’s server
challenges include making the workforce more mobile and getting the most
performance for the money. Here are a few recent enterprise server trends that
are designed to address these issues head on:
Petabyte
Is the New Standard
If one gigabyte can hold seven minutes of high
definition video, one petabyte can hold the equivalent of more than 13 years of
high definition photo. Petabyte servers are, to put it simply, huge. They are
also the new standard in enterprise storage.
Today’s businesses are making it standard practice
to generate, gather, and store as much data as possible about their customers,
their competitors, and their products which is later used to analyze industry
trends. Petabyte servers give businesses and corporations the capacity they
need to store this large amount of data without the need to install and
maintain extremely large numbers of servers.
Improved
Thermal Performance
Increased server density and the need for higher
performance levels from existing servers have led IT professionals and server
manufacturers to search for improved heat dissipation methods. Most of today’s
enterprise servers are built with smart sensors that automatically control
server thermals for optimized cooling.
These auto-control sensors also have the effect of
saving energy, and thus, lowering energy expenses for the businesses that
implement them. Some businesses even have the potential to increase their data
center capacity by more than three times without significantly increasing
energy costs or sacrificing performance.
Convergence
for Simpler Management
Many businesses are seeking for simpler server
management by converging their IT infrastructure. IT professionals are unifying
software, storage, networking, applications, and more in order to increase
synergy among the individual components of their data centers. This allows
businesses to accelerate growth while containing costs.
Virtualization
at All Levels
Although desktop and server virtualization is not a
new concept, more and more businesses are “going virtual” from the ground up so
that their storage, servers, and networking resources can be implemented
throughout the organization. Virtualization allows employees to be more
mobile—they can use their smart devices on the go or their personal laptops at
home without sacrificing access to resources and business applications.
Virtualization also allows for increased security of
sensitive data since it is all stored in a central location. This technique
also lets IT managers to have more control of when and how information is used,
and who has access to what files and programs. It also simplifies the IT
management, which allows employees to spend more time working on
mission-critical tasks and less time on mundane updates.
Storage
Is Increasingly Non-local
Of course, perhaps the biggest trend in enterprise
servers is cloud storage. About 40 percent of businesses currently use cloud
services as either a primary or secondary backup for data, according to a
recent survey. This number is only expected to rise as more businesses become
more comfortable with the idea of outsourcing their storage needs.
The trend toward cloud storage affects nearly every
level of today’s IT departments. What businesses gain in convenience and
mobility, they sometimes sacrifice for complete data control and security.
Whether businesses will jump fully “into the cloud” and give up their private
data centers altogether remains to be seen.
These are only a few of the enterprise trends. What
would you say are the most important trends in enterprise servers today?
John Hodge
is a writer for RackMountPro. When he’s not writing he loves
computers and everything related to them, gaming and spending time with his
family. Connect with John on Google +. In addition to selling Windows and
servers for Linux RackMountPro has been producing and
selling rackmount servers and storage since 2001.
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