FEATURE
THERE WILL BE AN EVEN
GREATER NEED FOR HYPERSCALE
DATA CENTRES IN STRATEGIC
LOCATIONS AROUND THE
WORLD .
As the nervous system of the digital universe , hyperscale facilities must be highly connected , served by diverse high-speed low-latency fibre networks capable of receiving and sending large volumes of data around the globe in a matter of milliseconds . By default , they will be points of presence ( PoPs ) for leading international carriers and provide access to hundreds of ISPs . Deployment of cloud gateways that bypass the public Internet and connect directly into public cloud subsea cable infrastructure , such as Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute , will also be a prerequisite .
Furthermore , as they have emerged as the focal points for carriers , ISPs and Internet exchanges , hyperscale data centre owners , operators and customers will assume more control over the location and specification of global telecom networks .
Enterprise colocation
The growing costs and complexity of maintaining on-premise data centres – including hosting private cloud solutions – will continue to fuel the ongoing shift to colocation during 2021 and beyond . Increasingly , IT workloads will be shared between providers of off-premise colocation and cloud hosting services as enterprises address the cost and complexity implications and risks of running servers and private clouds in-house .
Significant growth will also come from areas such as High-Performance Computing ( HPC ). In addition – hastened by COVID-19 – organisations rethinking their ongoing use of office space will mean many more will want their IT stack to be independent of their offices , in a lights-out critical services environment that supports distributed ‘ pandemic ’ operations .
However , it is important to highlight that to satisfy these needs , data centre facilities will need to offer maximum scalability not only in terms of available space , but also vast reserves of highly concentrated power , specialist cooling and diverse high-speed connectivity .
But it ’ s worth remembering that colocation facilities are not all the same – far from it . So , careful evaluation will be essential on the part of prospective customers to ensure future-proofed delivery of their larger workload requirements .
36 Issue 22 www . intelligentdatacentres . com