2016 Data Center News & Trends Wrap Up

Another year down. Although 2016 was turbulent, to say the least, in the data center world things keep chugging along at an exciting pace. With mega-mergers completing, cloud adoption accelerating, and green energy continuing to make headlines, the data center industry keeps on changing and growing.

Here are the biggest headlines from around the data center world, plus the most popular posts from our own blog this year. Catch up on the articles getting the most clicks before we say goodbye to 2016 and usher in the New Year.

Headlines from Around the Industry

Telecoms Give Up on Data Centers

After buying up cloud providers and beefing up data center facilities for several years in hopes of selling additional hosting services to their business customers, both Verizon and CenturyLink bowed out of the data center market this year, putting their facilities up for sale. For a while it looked as though only CenturyLink would have its data centers sold by the end of the year, but Verizon announced their own buyer this month.

US Data Centers Consume Vast Amounts of Energy – But Are Very Efficient Overall

The US Department of Energy, working with researchers at Stanford, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon, released a report on data center energy consumption. With many articles and think pieces dedicated to the sheer energy use of our digital lives, you might expect this report to be devastating, and Greenpeace to salivate at the sight of it. It turns out that data centers, while consuming a massive 70 billion kilowatt-hours of energy (equivalent to 2% of all US energy consumption), became much more efficient in the past four years. If they were just as efficient as in 2010, energy consumption should have been closer to 110 billion kilowatt-hours, so efficiency improvements essentially saved around 40 billion kWh.

ASHRAE Gets Rid of PUE

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) is an influential industry group that publishes a standard and guidelines for data center facility design. This year they decided to drop Power Usage Effectiveness as a requirement for their standards, shaking up the efficiency benchmark. PUE was cited as too easy to manipulate and too variable across differing environments. For example, a facility that is built out completely for power and cooling but not yet filled with equipment will have a poor PUE rating. Efficiency measurements will naturally remain a vital piece of data center design, but PUE might be on its way out as the de facto standard.

Dell-EMC Merger Closes

While this news was largely a remnant of 2015, when the merger of industry giants Dell and EMC was announced, it still reverberated across the I.T. world. Clearing regulatory hurdles, Dell-EMC is now a single entity, and the largest privately controlled tech company in the world.

Containers Continue to Generate Interest

Containers, an alternate technology to traditional virtualization that make it simple to host and move applications, have become one of the hottest trends in the data center. 2016 will likely be remembered as the year that containers truly reached mainstream awareness and adoption, with over 50% reporting they are at least considering them, and 64% planning to “mainstream” them within a year.