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Gartner Predicts half of cloud data centres will deploy

robots with AI capabilities by 2025

Robots to help alleviate staff shortage challenges plaguing data centre industry

y 2025, half of cloud data centres will deploy advanced robots with artificial intelligence (AI) and
Bmachine learning (ML) capabilities, resulting in 30% higher operating efficiency, according to Gartner.
“The gap between growing server and storage volumes at data centres, and the number of capable
works to manage them all is expanding,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The risk of
doing nothing to address these shortcomings is significant for companies.
“Data centre operations will only increase in complexity as organisations 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.”

Robots are ideal for the tedious and repetitive nature of data centres
Most of the work that takes place in a data centre is tedious, complex and repetitive. Examples include
capacity planning, rightsizing virtual machine and container environments, or guaranteeing the efficient
use of resources to avoid “cloud waste” for enterprises and their buyers.
These are all areas where robots excel. “Data centres 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 Nag. Sid Nag

There are four areas in which robots will be the most impactful to automating data centres over the next “While robots have already been leveraged
five years: across industries such as automotive and
1. Sever upgrades and maintenance: Once servers are phased out, the task of decommissioning and manufacturing, opportunities across data
destroying drives can be accomplished faster and more efficiently by industrial robots than humans. centres have been overlooked,” said Nag. “IT
This is especially true for companies that conduct mass upgrades frequently, for example any cloud leaders can steer the intelligent automation of
provider. cloud data centre operations and processes to
2. Monitoring: Robot sensor probes provide much more granular server rack temperature data without create key differentiators for their enterprises,
the need to install any invasive physical hardware. Robots used for remote monitoring can also be such as increased uptime and meeting SLAs for
utilised to collect other data, such as sound and images, to detect any irregularities. their cloud offerings, which will become more of
3. Data centre security: Maintaining a digitally and physically secure data centre facility is a top a reality through the use of robots.”
priority for all data centre companies. Robots can provide a layer of physical security through a Gartner analysts will provide additional
range of different capabilities including human temperature checks via heat sensors or license plate analysis on cloud strategies and infrastructure
recognition for parking facilities. and operations trends at the Gartner IT
4. AI/ML in cloud operations: In conjunction with robots, modern AI- and ML-enabled technology Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies
enables the monitoring and management of IT processes in the data centre. Users of this technology, Conferences which is taking place virtually 22-23
such as site reliability engineers, can interact and communicate with the given platform through November in EMEA.
natural language. These platforms are capable of learning from past situations to improve efficiency
in future instances. To learn more, visit gartner.com.