The data center is coming under immense pressure. Connected cars, smart factories and smart cities are among the technologies driving a boom in connected devices, which Gartner predicts will see 20.4 billion connected things worldwide by 2020. The volumes of data flowing from these devices are also increasing.

At the same time, cloud service providers (CSPs) must work within tight constraints in the physical environment of their data centers, with restrictions on the space, power and cooling available. CSPs need to process the growing data volumes in a way that is power efficient, and has sufficiently low latency to support real-time applications, such as artificial intelligence.