By Rand Christensen

Four major business tsunamis are about to hit the data center, says Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix, Inc., and keynote speaker at Data Center World’s 2010 spring conference in Nashville, Tenn., Mar. 7–11. With the convergence of networking and cloud computing, and with dramatic increases in content and mobile applications all hitting the industry simultaneously, we need to ask ourselves if we are ready, says Lillie. Data center managers will need to deal with the constraints of their current growth, reliability, security and sustainability strategies while chartering the challenging times ahead.

Global Internet traffic alone is expected to continue to grow 38 percent annually through 2013 while the global mobile data growth rate is predicted at 128 percent. All this will happen while global cloud services revenue is likely to continue to grow exponentially over the next several years. Throw in the increase in the U.S. financial services trading volume—more than 200 percent growth in thousands of peak messages per second during 2009—and the industry can gain a sense of the significance of the looming challenges, says Lillie.

The good news is that these challenges offer unprecedented opportunities if data center managers can provide business platforms to optimize their customers’ needs. They can do this by providing more network choice, flexibility, agility and speed worldwide.

Data center managers can take advantage of the days ahead, says Lillie, by aligning their business strategies with customer strategies and deploying solutions that those customers need, such as multi-source access to global networks, virtualized IT infrastructure, consolidated applications on the edge, and disaster recovery/business continuity aligned to today’s sophisticated cyber terrorism threats.