An inside-outside world

Data center managers will also need to bring together the people running their data centers, whether it is staff or outside vendors.

Outside companies will provide some of those management and configuration tasks, Villars said. The challenge for IT organizations will be to manage multiple data centers with multiple sources of staff.

As more companies rely on service providers for staffing, data center managers will increasingly face the job of managing the movement and security of data — whether it is on premises or off premises.

“Your staff and the staff your partners provide to help deliver new service and new capabilities … [are] increasingly critical,” Villars said.

The job of data center staff at enterprises will be to organize and synchronize people to make sure all teams are functioning and performing efficiently, he said.

Agile has long been a term associated with software development, but it will soon become an equally important quality in the data center, too, Villars said. Agility for the data center will mean being able to move assets and data into new facilities quickly, and also getting the financing in place.

The new data center environment will soon take center stage, said Adrian Nowik, technology manager at Pan American Energy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I will need to monitor the management of distributed data centers not managed by my own people; I will need to pay more attention to that.

“I will need to monitor the management of distributed data centers not managed by my own people; I will need to pay more attention to that,” he said.

Different data centers and different infrastructures will also force Nowik to find new tools to monitor security and performance.

Convergence and software-defined infrastructure are other data center industry trends that will also become “more critical,” and the move toward it must happen faster, Villars said.

Some of the new hyper-converged offerings in 2016 and 2017 will drive data center consolidation for the data center and its staff. Hyper-converged and software-defined infrastructure will accelerate the use of managed services to do basic administration and configuration, as well as shift staff time toward “value-added business services” and managing all the data that is being created.

“This has major consequences for data center facilities and data center deployment,” Villars said.

Data center staff will need to be more aggressive about automating discovery, provisioning and location tasks, he said.

“We can’t rely on individuals walking through the building looking for space and power,” he said. “We need systems to be self-identifying and self-discovering.”