In the past I have written about a myriad of topics and have participated on the speaking circuit discussing “The Cloud has Walls,” “The New Role of the CIO,” and total cost of ownership (TCO). In 2017 I am focusing on third generation (3G) data centers and how they support the Internet of Things (IoT), hyperscale, and data center-as-a-service (DCaaS). As technology has evolved and grown dramatically within the last two years, the 3G data center also needs to adapt to both rack level installations to large hyperscale installations.

In recent publications, I described G1 data centers as the initial colocation facilities that were created around supporting a small cluster of racks. This type of colocation data center dates back to the late ’90s. Then came G2 data centers which focused on the wholesale product, offering larger installations built to the PDU level in which tenants then managed their own white space environment. G3 data centers of today need to accommodate both rack level tenants supporting IoT on a DCaaS level, and have the inventory 3 MW+ to support large hyperscale compute tenants.