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STAMFORD, Conn. — A new report says robots with artificial intelligence (AI) are coming to help run cloud data centers.
The report by Gartner predicts that half of cloud data centers will deploy advanced robots with AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, resulting in 30% higher operating efficiency. The move will be caused by staff shortages in the data center market.
Gartner released the report this month: “Emerging Technologies and Trends: Use of Robots and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning for Cloud Data Center Operations.”
The majority of the work in a data center is “tedious, complex, and repetitive,” according to Gartner.
“Data centers are an ideal sector to pair robots and AI to deliver a more secure, accurate and efficient environment that requires much less human intervention,” said Sid Nag, research VP, Gartner.
For instance, robots could “excel” in each of these data center functions: capacity planning; rightsizing virtual machine and container environments; and guaranteeing the efficient use of resources to avoid “cloud waste” for enterprises and their buyers.
“The gap between growing server and storage volumes at data centers and the number of capable workers to manage them all is expanding,” Nag said. “The risk of doing nothing to address these shortcomings is significant for enterprises.
“Data center operations will only increase in complexity, as organizations move more diverse workloads to the cloud and as the cloud becomes the platform for a combinatorial use of additional technologies, such as edge and 5G, to name a few.”
Nag added that while robots have been leveraged in industries such as automotive and manufacturing, “opportunities across data centers have been overlooked.”
“IT leaders can steer the intelligent automation of cloud data center operations and processes to create key differentiators for their enterprises, such as increased uptime and meeting SLAs for their cloud offerings, which will become more of a reality through the use of robots.”
See more: The Artificial Intelligence Market
4 areas where AI robots will automate data centers
1. Sever upgrades and maintenance
Once servers are phased out, the task of decommissioning and destroying drives can be accomplished faster and more efficiently by industrial robots than humans. This is especially true for companies that conduct mass upgrades frequently, such as any cloud provider.
2. Monitoring
Robot sensor probes provide much more granular server rack temperature data without the need to install any invasive physical hardware. Robots used for remote monitoring can also be utilized to collect other data, such as sound and images to detect any irregularities.
See more: Artificial Intelligence: Current and Future Trends
3. Data center security
Maintaining a digitally and physically secure data center facility is a top priority for all data center companies. Robots are able to provide a layer of physical security through a range of different capabilities, including human temperature checks via heat sensors or license plate recognition for parking facilities.
4. AI/ML in cloud operations
In conjunction with robots, modern AI- and ML-enabled technology enables the monitoring and management of IT processes in the data center. Users of this technology, such as site reliability engineers (SREs), are able to interact and communicate with the given platform through natural language. These platforms are capable of learning from past situations to improve efficiency in future instances.
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