To stay competitive and agile in today’s shifting digital landscape, data center architectures are evolving to meet the demands and complexities imposed by increasing business requirements.  Gartner, in fact, predicts the importance, role, and function of data centers will change over the next five years, which may leave many organizations wondering how to plan their future data center architectures.

To shed light on the evolving data center, we’ve compiled a list of five must-read cloud computing reports that cover everything from new technologies to data center strategy and future data center and operational models.  Take a look through the following report summaries to better understand the rapidly changing data center environment, as well as some of the industry trends and challenges contributing to this evolution.

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• Server SAN Market Definition
• Creating Customer-Centric Datacenters That Are Agile, Efficient, and Secure with IBM’s Data Center Services
• Pervasive Technology Trends Shaping the Business and the Implications for Your Data Center
• Data Center Knowledge Guide to Modular Data Centers
• The State of Data Center Evolution

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Server SAN Market Definition

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The largest Web-based companies in the world have proven a new model for managing and scaling a combined architecture of compute and storage. The hyperscale companies, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, use a design of local distributed storage. The key differentiation of this new architecture is the ability to be extremely scalable and simple to manage. The advantages of this architecture can also benefit enterprise and service provider customers. Wikibon believes that this new category, which shall be called Server SAN, is an important component of software-led infrastructure. This paper will start the discussion for defining this new category and explaining how it fits into the IT marketplace. 

Creating Customer-Centric Data Centers That Are Agile, Efficient, and Secure with IBM’s Data Center Services

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Data Centers are powering a new and more demanding era of IT built to accommodate organizations’ growing reliance on mobile devices and applications, greater use of cloud-based applications, and use of data analytics to transform existing business processes.  These datacenters should be highly automated and standardized, where applications and data will be deployed and provisioned on systems and in sites based on workload demands.

Pervasive Technology Trends Shaping the Business and the Implications for Your Data Center

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This IBM white paper describes the data center implications of cloud computing, mobile technologies, social collaboration, and business analytics.  It also introduces you to the predictive tools and techniques that IBM is using to help companies build data center strategies that hold up in the face of such disruptive technologies.  For businesses, the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Those whose data centers can flex and adapt will be in the best position to act and to capitalize on emerging technology trends and the leadership opportunities they bring.

Data Center Knowledge Guide to Modular Data Centers

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The data center infrastructure has evolved far beyond a centralized solution.  Now, with cloud computing, more data demands, and distributed environments—there is a greater than ever need for agility. In creating a more flexible data center solution, organizations are seeing the direct benefits in working with modular designs. A modular data center is an approach that implies a prefabricated module or a method for delivering data center infrastructure in a modular fashion. A modular solution takes the best ideas for design, reliability and efficiency and packages everything into a prefabricated, repeatable and operationally optimized module.  Now data centers can grow and expand while using efficient modular technologies. 

The State of Data Center Evolution

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Most IT executives say that some of their organizations’ data centers will max out of power, cooling, or space by the end of 2014, according to new research from UBM Tech and InformationWeek Marketing Services.  This study, conducted in April 2013, takes an in-depth look at how IT decision makers rate the challenges they face as they evolve data centers to handle fast-growing volumes of data.

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The rapidly changing data center environment is forcing architectures to evolve to address industry trends such as virtualization, power and cooling, server density, and more. What’s missing from our list of cloud computing reports discussing the future of the data center? What would you add to yours?

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