While attending the DCD Enterprise conference in NYC in May, I was amazed at the number of presentations and vendor booths highlighting edge computing, 5G, and digital transformation.

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Happy 2018, and if you have not heard these terms last year, container, cloud, colocation/MTDC, hybrid, edge, modular, and OCP, applied to data centers enough times — it is time to update your subscription to Mission Critical Magazine.

As is my usual practice for my year end column, I asked the official Hot Aisle Insight crystal ball for guidance on the latest developments and trends in data centers.

By virtue of its name, starting from the days of the mainframe, we traditionally tend to think of the “data center” as the central point for the data processing, storage, as well as the nexus of the data network.

A long time ago in the mid-1990s, Ken Brill, Jedi Knight, brilliantly created the concept of a “tier system of availability” based primarily on the redundancy level of the facility power and cooling infrastructure, and subsequently founded the Uptime Institute (UI).

The enterprise and colocation data center operators are infused with a risk adverse culture.

Liquid cooling (LC) has been used since the early mainframe days and to cool some supercomputers.

Welcome to 2017, and as predicted in my “Show Me the Money” prognosis, the digital ecosystem continues to expand exponentially.

As is my usual practice for this annual predictions column, I asked the official Hot Aisle Insight crystal ball for guidance.