We certainly haven’t been bored this year. Amid political upheaval on both sides of the Atlantic, large data center players were adopting new business models, and testing new approaches to infrastructure.

It was a great year for public cloud computing, with Oracle finally entering the market – a vote of confidence from the company that previously described cloud as “gibberish”.

Peter was pleased with the results of a research project carried out by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that suggested data centers don’t consume nearly as much electricity as we thought they did.

Sebastian has been looking at cyber security, and the rise in the number and intensity of DDoS attacks - who could have expected that IoT devices would become so dangerous, so soon?

It has been a great year for memory, with products like Intel’s 3D Xpoint, Netlist’s HybriDIMM and HPE’s Persistent Memory all crawling out of the woodwork. The industry is working on new computing architectures to take advantage of all this memory – something we expect to cover for the next few years.

There was more interest in GPUs, as suitable tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Sebastian was especially taken with the story of AMD, the eternal underdog.

We’ve also seen plenty of innovation in open source hardware - led by hyperscale customers like Facebook and Microsoft.

All of these stories will develop further in 2017. To keep pace with the data center industry, be sure to subscribe to the magazine, visit the website and we’ll see you next year!

DatacenterDynamics editorial team