Disruptive external forces are driving profound changes and creating opportunities and challenges in the process. Those forces are familiar—cloud computing, cybersecurity and sustainability among them—but the industry’s responses are unlike anything seen before.
The dominant enterprise archetype today is the high-availability data center, with 2N power and redundant generators and cooling. Most enterprises have added some form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to their IT architecture and a growing number are moving to, or investigating, a bimodal architecture that recognizes that different applications, data types and groups of users have different requirements in terms of speed of deployment, productivity, efficiency, resiliency and security. In addition, open computing and the software-defined data center have the potential to change the way IT systems are configured and supported.