IDC is forecasting that service provider data centre capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750 percent between 2014 and 2019. Also, IDC says, the growing importance of analytics in IoT services will mean that ‘hyper scale’ data centres capture most of this IoT driven workload.
IDC also says that IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge. (Cisco has been pushing this concept heavily and has coined the term ‘fog computing’ to describe it. However the term does not appeared to have been accepted by others, IDC included)
“The growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks [and] service providers will adopt IoT technologies (smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own data centre assets (smart data centres).”
IDC says that, although the billions of endpoints or connected ‘things’ will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the data centre will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential.
“Without question, IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger data centres, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure,” IDC says. “The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that data centre capacity ends up residing in service provider data centres.”
The findings come from a new IDC report Impact of Internet of Things on Datacenter Demand and Operations that “analyses the growing impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on data centre demand and operations at a worldwide level [and] discusses the key use profiles that are shaping deployments of IT assets from edge to cloud in support of IoT offerings.”
