The cloud may be the single most significant change in the data center ecosystem since the advent of hot aisle/cold aisle configurations. It changed everything by eliminating any distinction between individual servers, racks, rows, or even facilities. Applications flocked to the cloud, minimizing the need for traditional enterprise data centers and prompting the bifurcation of the industry toward hyperscale facilities supporting cloud and colocation on one end and more robust edge sites on the other.

Infrastructure providers reacted quickly, developing offerings that better align with the needs of today’s cloud environments and others that support a more robust edge of the network. Now we’re seeing these infrastructure systems go a step further, not just supporting the cloud, but leveraging cloud resources to improve performance and simplify management and service both at the edge and in large data centers. These intelligent infrastructure systems, with machine learning capabilities working in tandem with cloud-based analytics, are fundamentally changing the way we manage and service these complex environments.