The data center of the future is a constantly evolving concept. If you go back to World War II, the ideal was to have a massive mainframe in a large room fed by punched cards. A few decades later, distributed computing promoted an Indiana Jones-like warehouse with endless racks of servers, each hosting one application. Virtualization upset that apple cart by enabling massive consolidation and greatly reducing the number of physical servers inside the data center.

Now it appears that we are entering a minimalist period: Data center spaces remain but have been so stripped down that all that remains are a few desktops in the center of an otherwise empty space. Like a magic trick by David Copperfield, the Lamborghini under the curtain has disappeared in a puff of smoke. But instead of showing up at the back of the room, the compute hardware has been transported to the cloud. And just as in a magic trick, IT operation managers are applauding loudly.

“We moved backup and disaster recovery (DR) to the cloud and now intend to move even more functions to the cloud,” said Erick Panger, director of information systems at TruePosition, a company that provides location intelligence solutions. “It looks like we are heading to a place where few real data centers will exist in most companies with everything being hosted in the cloud.”

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http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/05/10/the-data-center-of-the-future-and-cloud-disaster-recovery/