EDITOR’S QUESTION
DAVID FRIEND,
FOUNDER AND CEO,
WASABI
rganising your data
O
centre for optimum
performance has
become an increasingly
important consideration
as data continues to
proliferate at enormous scale, proving
integral to business success and local data
protection requirements are front of mind.
Some data centre operators have started
to provide both compute and storage
infrastructure as-a-Service. As a result of
design developments, in the near future,
data centres might need a specialised
‘storage area’ that is segregated from
the rest of the cages for security and
cooling reasons. This is because general
storage uses less power than compute so
has lower cooling requirements. Getting
cooling right is paramount as you can
easily waste cooling power unnecessarily.
There are also ways that data centre
cooling can be tailored to large storage
areas more efficiently than if storage is
spread out among every tenant’s cages
– for example, when designing a floor
plan of this nature, Compute-as-a-Service
and Storage-as-a-Service would likely be
walled off.
Another major consideration when
designing a data centre is the size and
relative spread of the data centres
themselves. Given most data is generated
and consumed locally, moving it across
long distances between huge facilities
isn’t intuitive.
At Wasabi, we’re actively considering
using a tight network of smaller cloud
storage units, rather than a handful of
very large storage facilities – the issue is
making this work without losing efficiency
ANOTHER
MAJOR
CONSIDERATION
WHEN
DESIGNING A
DATA CENTRE
IS THE SIZE
AND RELATIVE
SPREAD OF THE
DATA CENTRES
THEMSELVES.
at scale. While there isn’t ‘intelligence’
on how to make this work in practice,
in theory having a tight network of
smaller storage facilities that are close
to customers, close to the compute,
aware of each other and even share
metadata, is possible. What this would
mean in practice is local data could be
cached and accessed locally across the
world. The need for this kind of storage
architecture will be greatly increased by
the rollout of 5G and would have huge
benefits for many industries. In healthcare
for example, a patient’s records could be
accessed instantaneously by doctors in
different regions because the metadata
is replicated globally, with every storage
node able to function as an ‘origin’ server.
There are numerous ways you can
ensure data centre design contributes
to optimum performance, but the cloud
industry is evolving rapidly and so must
data centre design strategy if it is to
maintain and improve upon efficiencies
going forward.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com Issue 19
31