Driving efficiency, reliability, and resiliency in data centers is not just a matter of upgrades – it requires rethinking how data is stored, processed, and accessed to keep pace with evolving business models and shifting market landscapes. In this context, Cisco shares four priorities for data centers on which organizations should focus this year.
Gain flexibility by simplifying operations
Ensuring that new data science projects integrate smoothly into the data center while fulfilling all expectations for availability, security, and governance will make things easier for employees. Businesses should be able to innovate without having to fundamentally change data center management, as IT departments already face significant storage, compute, networking, and middleware challenges.
Ideal infrastructure includes features designed to reduce the effort required from IT, such as:
Ease of integration with existing systems
Ability to support a hybrid or multicloud environment
Accelerators for deployment of AI-ready storage, compute, and networking architecture
Automation solutions for provisioning, patching, and other routine tasks
Management tools that provide a unified view of all resources
Simplifying the monitoring and management of the data center will grant organizations more flexibility to address regulatory requirements, control costs, and achieve reliable, scalable performance.
Ensure the data center is AI-ready (even if the business is not)
Tremendous hype around generative AI is creating an insatiable demand for faster, more efficient data centers to power intelligent solutions. Not every organization considers itself “all in” on AI. Yet all need to hit goals, reduce operational expenses, and keep ops running—and that alone can require infusing AI into processes or building data center clusters to train large language models (LLMs) at scale.
To protect their data center investment, organizations must not underestimate the increasing role of AI. They need to consider how their network will perform as it evolves to handle various AI use cases.
Network growth in any form, whether added services or increased traffic, should not disrupt business. Organizations must ensure that modernizing or building new data centers does not get in the way of those they already have and rely on to run machine learning, IoT, and other core processes. According to Cisco’s 2024 Global Networking Trends Report, 61 percent of IT leaders plan to simplify data center network operations with an AI-native platform approach within the next two years.
Foster culture of security to drive value
Data centers are becoming more distributed, with more locations and devices in the network increasing endpoints and potential attack surfaces. And as hybrid work has impacted where data resides, maintaining control becomes even more difficult. Critical features, such as data encryption and firewalls, are necessary but do not offer enough protection on their own in the current threat environment.
Modern data centers demand a highly secure and agile network infrastructure that can follow workloads wherever they go. Ideal security solutions offer full network visibility, including users, devices, applications, workloads, processes—and the data center. Traffic partitioning can help reduce the attack surface, and if a potential threat is detected, contain the threat and keep it from moving across the data center.
Organizations committed to data protection should enforce consistent policies, use application permit listing, and adopt innovative solutions, such as zero-trust spine-leaf fabrics, which ensure connectivity and strict controls at every endpoint. The approach to security should not only provide protection but also support automation, efficiency, and adaptation as the demands of cybersecurity evolve.
Align the data center roadmap with clear sustainability goals
Exacerbated by higher scaling and speed demands, the compute density of servers used to train LLMs is making AI the biggest data center disruptor since the public cloud. According to Epoch AI, the computational power required to train frontier AI models doubles in cost every nine months. Utilities that have historically planned out demand by a decade must now contend with a surge in speculative investment as organizations race to secure energy sources.
Businesses need to understand that this demand growth is not only a result of the increased power consumption and heat output that AI processes introduce but also due to the exponential increase in innovative use cases for consuming data. This should not diminish energy concerns but rather motivate organizations to ensure that energy is central to every technology decision they make.
Businesses that succeed in this area tend to align their technology roadmaps with clear sustainability goals across the entire value chain. ClusterPower, for example, built the largest data center facility in Romania with sustainability in mind. Components designed for optimal efficiency help create a solid foundation for data center sustainability.
Visibility of power consumption across IT infrastructure in data centers gives organizations insights into ways of lowering cost structure and increasing efficiency. These range from rerouting traffic and implementing activity-based power management features to consolidating applications into services, reconfiguring design, and identifying opportunities to refurbish.
Mohannad Abuissa, Director of Solutions Engineering at Cisco Middle East, Africa, Türkiye, Romania, and CIS, said: “The data center underpins a storage, compute, and networking revolution that’s deepening connectivity across our world. Modern data centers are evolving in leaps and bounds. In a very short time, infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support applications and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and into a multicloud environment. Today, data is connected across multiple data centers, the edge, and public and private clouds. In this dynamic landscape, organizations must take take a proactive and holistic approach to keeping their data centers up to date to ensure uninterrupted business operations.”