More and more of our lives are lived online. Our music collections, bookshelves, vacation memories and more are increasingly digitized and uploaded into the cloud, the vast network of server farms that provide the bulk of online storage today. Research firm Gartner projects that by 2016, 36 percent of consumer content will be stored on the cloud, up from a mere seven percent in 2011.
Service providers, watching these trends with a wary eye, will be required to accommodate ever-increasing demands for storage as consumer appetites for cloud content storage continues to grow. To adapt, many service providers are exploring new options in data center architecture that will permit greater flexibility and control over hardware costs.