Data centers around the world will soon have a lot more robot staff than they have today, and as a result will be significantly more efficient, a new report from Gartner claims.
The market analysts say that by 2025, half of cloud data centers will deploy bots with AI and ML capabilities and will be 30% more efficient for it.
While the promise of operational efficiency may be the driving force behind the growing interest in bots, it’s actually the expanding gap between growing server and storage volumes at data centers and the number of capable works to manage them all, that motivates data center operators most.
Complexities
“The risk of doing nothing to address these shortcomings is significant for companies," explained Gartner research VP Sid Nag.
“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.”
Data centers "ideal" playground
Gartner claims that most of the work taking place in a data center is “tedious, complex, and repetitive” - namely tasks like capacity planning, rightsizing virtual machine and container environments, or guaranteeing the efficient use of resources to avoid cloud waste, could all be managed by an AI-powered bot.
“Data centers are an ideal sector to pair robots and AI to deliver a more secure, accurate, and efficient environment that requires much less human intervention,” said Nag.
Server upgrades and maintenance, monitoring, data center security, and AL/ML in cloud operations are the four main areas in which bots could have the biggest impact, Gartner concluded.
Industrial robots can decommission and destroy drives faster and more efficiently than humans; robot sensor probes are infinitely better at gathering data on possible irregularities; security could be beefed up in numerous ways, while AI and ML in cloud operations enable the monitoring and management of IT processes in the data center (for example, site reliability engineers could interact with a platform through natural language).
“While robots have already been leveraged across industries such as automotive and manufacturing, opportunities across data centers have been overlooked,” said Nag. “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.”
