Data Center

Growth of Digital Traffic Fuels the Rise of Micro Data Centers [#Infographic]

With the number of devices and the data coming from those devices increasing every year, IT needs to support more smaller data centers to scale.

Ricky Ribeiro

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Ricky publishes and manages the content on BizTech magazine's website. He's a writer, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all-around digital guy.

They say size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to IT, that’s not necessarily true.

Some of the big Internet companies, like Facebook and Google, are going hog wild and building massive data centers to support their users' bottomless data appetites.

And there’s good reason to increase our data centers’ capacities: Recent estimates say that annual global data center IP traffic will reach 8.6 zettabytes by the end of 2018.

You might think that the only answer to this explosion of digital traffic is to build large data centers, but companies actually need to go smaller with data center technology too. Micro data centers, as they’re being called, allow enterprise IT to get closer to the devices and, in theory, reduce latency and produce a smaller energy footprint.

What’s the definition of “micro” in the term micro data center? Schneider-Electric defines a micro data center as “a self-contained, secure computing environment that includes all the storage, processing and networking required to run the customer’s applications.”

To further illustrate the value of micro data centers, Schneider-Electric has compiled stats and facts around the value of micro data centers. Check out the infographic below.