AI: Coming to a Data Center Near You

It's a truism that artificial intelligence (AI) is pervading all facets of technology from spotting early-stage cancer to understanding all forms of human speech to swapping your face with your cat's in real-time high-res video. A stampede of consumer applications has fueled and funded the mainstream demand, social acceptance and growing ubiquity of AI, and now, thinking systems are exploding into the enterprise IT landscape. Enterprise IT has seen AI become mainstream for many tasks, including cybersecurity, IT operations, monitoring, data analytics, business-process automation and infrastructure provisioning, in response to the widening gap between the slow-growing skilled-labor pool and fast-growing IT workloads. For data centers, however, they represent only the first raindrops of two gathering monsoons: AI for data centers and data centers for AI--read that twice. Today, smart products are already augmenting IT operations and analytics by sifting through a dizzying amount of operational telemetry data, spotting anomalies, correlating events and determining root causes.