final thought
I SEE THREE
Clive Partridge , technical manager , IT infrastructure at Rittal , casts his eye over three current industry trends .
The data centre market is fast evolving . For many companies , the data centre is regarded as one of the key drivers of business innovation thanks to its ability to store and process huge amounts of data safely and in real time . The digital transformation that we are now experiencing in private and in our working lives make data centres hugely valuable to support all living , business and production environments .
Trend one : Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things
There is a clear shift towards industry specific clouds to support the move towards Industry 4.0 in the workplace . Industry specific clouds are designed to accommodate the needs of particular industries ; a good example would be where businesses need particularly high levels of privacy and security around their data . Industry specific clouds are driven by new digital business models and services based on data from networked sensors , machines and terminals , known to many as the Internet of Things ( IoT ).
IoT is leading to more networking of production facilities , public infrastructures and transport systems or logistics chains , and companies expect to see huge gains in efficiency as a result .
Many more industry specific clouds will appear over the next 12 months , so-called ‘ industry collaborative clouds ’. According to market analysts IDC , the number is expected to triple to around 450 clouds by 2018 . These application platforms will enable all participants to exchange their own data , integrate their own processes and services or accelerate product development together .
Trend two : Modular data centres and edge computing
The IoT and data intensive analytics applications often need extremely low latencies . In most cases , the enormous amounts of data that are continuously being acquired ( for instance , as generated by the IoT ) require the first data analysis to be performed at the point of data creation . IT technical support for scattered development and production locations can only be attained when the IT landscape is expanded in a decentralised way . So providers will increasingly use modular , pre-configured IT solutions that they can quickly and easily set up and operate at their locations . At the same time , these systems must also support the future growth of the company , so they have to be based on open technologies and be scalable .
Complete modular and preconfigured systems meet the conditions for this so-called ‘ edge computing ’, ie . for processing data close to its place of origin . It means additional IT capacities can be created at the ‘ edges ’ of the corporate network . By 2019 , according to market analysts IDC , around 43 per cent of the data generated through the IoT will be processed by edge computing systems .
Trend three : Cloud and data centre as a service
We ’ ll see companies increasingly obtain referred IT services from the cloud , thus expanding their own data centres . CIOs must therefore deal with new operating models and establish the conditions for running a multi-cloud environment . Whether just individual software applications or complete platforms , the trend is towards data centres as service models , through which the company can obtain a great variety of services from the cloud which then selectively complement the existing IT landscape . In this instance opex models are available that optimise the consumption of computing power .
By the end of 2018 , half of all software solutions are expected to come from the cloud . Furthermore , an investigation by IDC has shown that small and medium sized businesses could be responsible for up to 40 per cent of public cloud spending by 2019 . According to Forrester Research , the global public cloud market will grow to nearly € 138bn in 2017 . These revenues only amounted to € 82bn in 2015 .
The focus looking ahead is clear : Given the growing importance of information as a production factor , it is becoming increasingly critical for companies to operate failsafe IT infrastructure . So the integration of cloud resources is an important tool that will enable enterprises to use a portion of their IT investment to expand data centres with the aid of cloud services . At the same time , they will ensure high availability , for example , via greater redundancy in power supply and climate control systems , and through innovative back up concepts or purely software defined data centres ( SDDCs ).
48 | March 2017