16% Of Data Centre Professionals Globally Will Be Retired By 2025 – Report
Remember when it was a trend to write a letter to your future self with predictions of what you think your life will be like in 10 years time?
Critical infrastructure provider Vertiv have taken a similar approach with its data centre survey that builds on research the company conducted back in 2014.
The company asked data centre professionals across the globe to look 10 years into the future and share their perspectives on how market and technology trends would shape the future of the industry.
Five years later, and reaching the halfway point of the future predictions, the company takes a look at some of those questions posed by the original “Data Center 2025: Exploring the Possibilities,” report.
The fact that stood out prominently was that globally 16% of participants expect to be retired by 2025, exacerbating an already problematic talent shortage.
In the U.S. and Canada, a higher percentage of data centre professionals (33%) expected to be retired by 2025. China had the lowest projected retirement rates at 8%.
An unexpected benefit of workforce challenges is the drive to normalised designs and the application of rapid deployment configurations that require less intellectual capital to deploy and support.
“Shifting workloads to the cloud has helped mitigate the impact of labour challenges in the short term, but as a hybrid, IT and edge computing continue to grow the skills gap is becoming a more serious issue,” said Robert Linsdell, managing director for Vertiv in Australia and New Zealand.
“These changes require new skills that may not exist in the legacy workforce and this could hamper the ability of some IT organisations to support their businesses as they continue to evolve.”
The company also pointed out the fact that new questions have emerged, when exploring the insights from the 800 plus data centre professionals that were involved in the survey.
In 2014, the primary computing platform for most businesses was still a discrete, multi-purpose enterprise data centre that was just beginning to shift workloads to the cloud and colocation in a meaningful way.
Back then, cloud computing building momentum, as two-thirds of the original Data Center 2025 participants (67%) expected at least 60% of computing capacity to be performed in the cloud by 2025.
The report revealed that this may seem low today compared to some analyst projections, but it demonstrates an understanding of the impact cloud computing would have.
One of the questions asked in the original report was, “Will data centres cluster in regions with low energy costs and cool climates, or will proximity to users drive location decisions?”
The company revealed that the answered turned out to be both.
“Since 2014, we’ve seen larger and larger cloud facilities being developed, creating a class of hyperscale facilities with distinct and innovative architectures,” noted Vertiv.
“At the same time, more data is being generated and consumed at the network edge, forcing compute and storage closer to users and devices in the form of mini and microdata centres.”
The report also revealed that there were some significant shifts in expectations for some energy sources this year compared to that of the original survey.
Compared to 2014, participants projected a lower percentage of total data centre energy to come from solar, natural gas, nuclear and wind.
Participants in the original survey projected 22% of data centre power would come from solar and an additional 12% from wind by 2025.
That’s a little more than one-third of data centre power from these two renewable sources, which seemed like an unrealistic projection at the time, according to Vertiv.
source dataeconomy
Industry: Data Centre