The outlook for 2012 looks quite cloudy. Cloud-based services became a more mainstream computing alternative resource in 2011 and will continue gaining momentum for both commercial and government organizations.

• The hot aisle will get hotter – possibly 110F even higher – as more enterprise data centers are adopting and approaching ASHRAE’s 2008 “recommended” upper intake-air temperature limit of 80.6F, with blade servers operating with 30-35F Delta-Ts. ASHRAE adding the new A1-A4 equipment classes to the 2011 version of its thermal guidelines pushes this even further with “allowable” intake temperatures of up to 113°F in the cold aisle (will that term become an oxymoron?).
• The “Cloud” in the data center may become real, since some data centers will also allow the humidity to raise as they start to use more outside air (or 100% outside air) to improve cooling efficiency. The hot aisle may become more humid (or sometimes less) as the environmental envelope is stretched to the new extremes (8-90% RH). ASHRAE’s stated goals to end or minimize the need for mechanical cooling (fashion outlook: safari jackets and perhaps matching rain hats will be the new uniform).
• Colos will continue to absorb small and medium-size enterprises’ data center operations as the cost of building, operating and upgrading their own facilities becomes more expensive and less of a strategic advantage.
• Solid State Drives will begin to make more inroads as the prices continue to fall and storage capacities rise.  Seagate has already started shipping its enterprise class Pulsar 2 800Gb SSDs offered in the existing Hot-Pluggable 2.5” form factor, while using an average of only 5 watts, yet can operate at up to 140F. This doesn’t mean spinning disk is dead. Since disk capacity continues to increase, whiles prices drop, the medium will continue to represent a substantial portion of large-scale commodity storage deployments. 
• The EPO will die very slowly, even though the 2011 NEC codes have eliminated it from their requirements. Local building inspectors and fire marshals will continue to require them for many years to come.
• Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) will be big this year as the need to monitor and improve energy efficiency grows.  The major players, such as Emerson and Schneider, have expanded their offerings and also have acquired some of the smaller vendors. More vendors will join in, but interoperability will remain an issue, since BMS systems, Modbus protocols and IT SNMP are still apples and oranges.
• Mobile, video and social networks will incite battles over bandwidth billing and may force the end of unlimited bandwidth at a fixed price for consumers (landline and mobile). It will also drive storage vendors’ equipment sales to new heights and create demand for more speeds and feeds from network vendors.
• Upgrading to 40Gb Ethernet (and 100Gb) will hasten the move to use even more fiber in the data center, despite the efforts by the cabling industry to promote copper cabling (Cat 6E and Cat 7, as well as shielded versions). Beside higher cost, these new copper cables are much larger in diameter than the older CAT 5E, and if implemented will become a huge physical choke point for airflow. Nonetheless, the myth that fiber is more expensive than copper will continue to be perpetuated by the copper cabling manufacturers. As a result, top-of-rack or end-of-row switching with fiber uplinks will become the preferred network architecture. Fiber vendors will need to do a better job educating IT and data center decision makers about the differences in size and performance between fiber and copper cabling systems. Newer higher-density fiber connectors, such as multi-strand modular cable systems, may help address the endless need for higher backbone speeds and accelerate the end of copper in the backbone. Attention IT equipment makers: if you offer lower-cost fiber interfaces in blade servers, there will be more room (and budgets) for computing equipment and less room required for costly large copper cabling and patch panels.
• Densities will continue to rise and older cooling systems and airflow designs will be more challenged to keep up. Cooling designs will begin to diverge into two camps: liquid cooling is making inroads to meet ever higher densities (ASHRAE released their Liquid Cooling Thermal Guidelines in September 2011 and IBM offered liquid cooling as an option in the latest “Z” series mainframe), while lower-density build-outs may consider following ASHRAE’s recommendations for air-side economizers to avoid mechanical cooling. Cold-aisle and hot-aisle containment and other airflow management strategies will no longer be considered leading-edge methodologies.  Close-coupled cooling and containment will become more commonplace in new mid-to-high-density designs.
• The EPA’s Energy Star programs for data centers will continue expanding to cover virtually all areas of the data center. The UPS, network gear and storage arrays are currently being added to the growing list of equipment covered by the program. More servers (including blades) will be part of version-two of the Energy Star requirements. Data center infrastrure efficiency will be subject to further scrutiny and possible local regulations by local building departments, as the data center is now included in ASHRAE 90.1.
• The computing loads in data centers will become more dynamic instead of nearly flat, due to widespread virtualization and as older IT equipment such as commodity servers are upgraded to Energy Star rated products, which have much lower idle power states and mandatory power management. This will result in more “traveling hot spots” during peaks or overcooling during lulls in computing loads, especially in older data centers, which were not designed to handle these changing load conditions.
• Modular and containerized data centers may finally begin to be more frequently considered and perhaps deployed in larger numbers, as HP, IBM and Dell continue to offer more variations. Eaton, Emerson, Schneider and many smaller specialty firms are adding their own solutions for modular computing as well as power and cooling building blocks.
• The Green Grid introduced PUE Version 2 and even more metrics, such as the Carbon Usage Effectiveness “CUE” Metric, Water Usage Effectiveness “WUE” and several more. This should keep the corporate sustainability departments busy, as well as supplying the marketing department’s spin doctors more PR fodder.