The top data center colocation trends for 2019

From hedges to multi-stories to the early days of 5G, here are the top ten trends for the data center industry this year.

New Year’s resolution – Data center designs build muscle and lose fat

We all know that break room cupcakes and stress eating can torpedo this common New Year’s resolution. But that’s for people… not data centers. Since the early days of colocation, data center designs were mainly about “the plus.” The question was how much more infrastructure you built into your data center so that you could be fault tolerant, concurrently maintainable, or both. New data center designs are more about “the N” – how much infrastructure you need to deliver the service. Application and system designs are more resilient than ever before. So you can lower the cost of your data center without reducing application availability by building up “the N muscle” and losing “the plus fat.”

“Hedge” data centers

Tech people love to name new IT architectures – anyone remember “fog computing?” How about a new data center architecture that combines Hyperscale + Edge to create “hedge” data centers? Clearly two of the biggest trends in 2018 were the dominance of massive, hyperscale cloud data centers and the emergence of new edge computing deployments. In 2019, look for colocation products that attempt to seamlessly integrate hyperscale and edge data centers to support new applications for AI, Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, big data, etc.

Big man on campus

It’s a quiet, but undeniable trend for 2019 – when given the choice between a stand-alone data center and a multi-facility data center campus, customers increasingly prefer the campus, especially in top markets. They like the combination of perimeter and facility security. They prefer the option to grow within multiple, fiber-connected buildings. They see the supplier’s commitment to developing a large campus as reducing their business risk.