FEATURE : DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE
compatible with legacy servers will be sought after as organisations look to ramp up their capacities to meet the rising demand .
With all of this in mind , without any doubt , hyper converged infrastructure should be the foundation for new data centres .”
Pereira explained that HCI converges the entire data centre stack , including compute , storage , storage networking and virtualisation . “ Complex and expensive legacy infrastructure is replaced by a distributed platform running on industry-standard commodity servers that enables enterprises to size their workloads
Pereira explained that converged infrastructure on the other hand is just legacy infrastructure re-packaged by vendors to appear friendlier , but given that it is built out of the same legacy architecture used in older data centres , it comes with all the same limitations : difficult to build , operate , upgrade and scale .
IN THE PAST THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS PROFESSIONALS WERE GIVEN THE CHOICE OF PLATFORMS FOR RUNNING AN APPLICATION OR BUSINESS SERVICE . THIS TRADITIONAL APPROACH IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE BECAUSE IT IS COMPONENT AND NOT BUSINESS SERVICE-ORIENTED .
precisely and to scale flexibly as needed ,” he said . “ Each server , also known as a node , includes x86 processors with SSDs and HDDs . Software running on each node distributes all operating functions across the cluster for superior performance and resilience .”
Pereira said by converging the entire data centre stack into multiples of a single physical unit that is a server , it simplifies the data centre to the maximum . “ All that you need to build a data centre is an Ethernet switch and nodes . Setting up such a data centre is extremely fast and adding capacity is simply performed by adding more nodes , at any time , without the need to touch any other infrastructure ,” he said .
According to Harb , Saudi Arabia has strong fibre connectivity in the Middle East that is connected to several parts of the world . “ Due to higher demand from Internet users to access fast Internet connections , Saudi Arabia is investing into expanding the instalment of fully functional 5G networks . To reduce latency and enable 5G networks to run fastest , cities are also investing in Edge Computing devices to process most the produced data at its origin , leading to a rapid growth in data centre investments .”
He added that CIOs in the MEA region , should further consider solar power as an important renewable energy . The availability of renewable energy to power data centres is increasing year-on-year ( YoY ) in the Saudi Arabian market .
Converged infrastructure
With converged infrastructure being tipped the future of the data centre , Tufekci believes converged infrastructure comes with several benefits over traditional data centre infrastructure for organisations such as scalability , reduced time-to-production and reduced operational overheads . “ CI and HCI also reduce deployment risk and speed time to application deployment , bringing new services to market rapidly . Due to the numerous advantages of HCI , the technology is experiencing exponentially growth in the Middle East ,” she noted .
“ Software-defined data centres are the key to optimise server infrastructure while delivering high-density data centre deployment , along with converged / hyperconverged infrastructure solutions and infrastructure management , monitoring and automation solutions , to allocate the required resources according to demand . Dockers and micro-services must also be considered by CIOs .”
Data centre capacity planning
“ The scaling is linear and unlimited and it offers superior performance and resilience . Given that all of this is 100 % software-driven it also provides unlimited flexibility to add capabilities in the future .
With the newest technologies addressing data centre capacity planning in the Middle East and what are the best data centre management tools available to CIOs in the region ?
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