Gartner’s world class data center conference was held once again during the first week of December at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. And once again it exceeded everyone’s imagination, drawing over 2,500 attendees with over 40% participating for the first time. Over the last several years, Gartner has expanded the “Granddaddy” of all data center conferences to include IT infrastructure and operations management (or I&O) content along with the historical data center infrastructure information that the conference started with many years ago.
The conference offered “cutting edge” data center infrastructure content reporting on the transition of the colocation data center industry from the wholesale real estate leasing and retail IT managed services business of just five years ago to the hybrid, private, and public multi-cloud operations of today. Other new and exciting concepts presented to the data center infrastructure attendees included edge computing solutions to support the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless communications, as well as the projected effects of artificial intelligence and Big Data on the future of data center infrastructure and operations.