Within the next five years. half of all data centers will deploy advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, resulting in a significant efficiency boost, according to IT research firm Gartner.
By 2025, half of cloud data centers will use advanced robots with AI and machine learning capabilities, which will increase operating efficiency by 30%, the firm said in a new report.
This expected trend comes as the gap between growing server and storage volumes and the lack of qualified workers to manage them all is expanding. Now, the IT industry will look to automation to help fill that gap, the research finds.
Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement that this trend poses a significant risk for enterprises.
“Data center operations will only increase in complexity as organizations move more diverse workloads to the cloud, and as the cloud becomes the platform for a combinatorial use of additional technologies such as edge and 5G, to name a few,” Nag said.
According to Gartner’s research, the majority of work in data centers is tedious, complex and repetitive, which makes this work perfect for AI and machine learning. This includes capacity planning, rightsizing virtual machine and container environments, and guaranteeing the efficient use of resources to avoid wasting cloud capacity.
These areas specifically are where robots and automation will provide the most value, according to Gartner:
- Sever upgrades and maintenance: Once servers are phased out, the task of decommissioning and destroying drives can be accomplished faster and more efficiently by industrial robots than humans. This is especially true for companies that conduct mass upgrades frequently, for example any cloud provider.
- Monitoring: Robot sensor probes provide much more granular server rack temperature data without the need to install any invasive physical hardware. Robots used for remote monitoring can also be utilized to collect other data, such as sound and images to detect any irregularities.
- Data center security: Maintaining a digitally and physically secure data center facility is a top priority for all data center companies. Robots are able to provide a layer of physical security through a range of different capabilities including human temperature checks via heat sensors or license plate recognition for parking facilities.
- AI/ML in cloud operations: In conjunction with robots, modernAI- and ML-enabled technology enables the monitoring and management of IT processes in the data center. Users of this technology, such as site reliability engineers, are able to interact and communicate with the given platform through natural language. These platforms are capable of learning from past situations to improve efficiency in future instances.
Robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning is leveraged across a variety of industries, but opportunities for this technology in data centers has been overlooked, Nag said.
“IT leaders can steer the intelligent automation of cloud data center operations and processes to create key differentiators for their enterprises, such as increased uptime and meeting SLAs for their cloud offerings, which will become more of a reality through the use of robots.”
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