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DATA CENTRE OF TOMORROW
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Forward thinking
Steve Davis , Marketing Director , Next Generation Data
www . nextgenerationdata . co . uk
Flexibility and scalability are the keys to evolving data centre services of the future
Data centres already play a significant part in society , although this isn ’ t always realised by the man in the street . And it ’ s going to get more interesting because of the impact of major disruptors such as the Cloud , Big Data , The IoT and high performance computing ( HPC ), and the growing appetite of both enterprise and SME organisations for moving some or all of their IT off-premises .
There are increasingly few organisations looking to self-build and finance in-house data centres due to the considerable Capex sums involved , and the ongoing expense in keeping them up to date with the latest power , cooling and network infrastructure . Not to mention security . The other factor is that we ’ re probably living in the most dramatic era of technological change , so why would you continue to build a bricks and mortar infrastructure against a constantly moving background of change ?
Then there ’ s the headache of running out of space for housing yet more or fewer racks , but a greater need for more power and cooling . Little wonder that out of pure necessity , it will be third party data centres increasingly at the vanguard of what the data centres of tomorrow will look like .
Without doubt , for the foreseeable future , only a select few of these data centre operators will be able to offer ‘ a one size fits all ’ to accommodate the increasingly demanding and complex requirements of users . Flexibility and scalability are the keys to this , which will demand large amounts of power and also physical space – despite server virtualisation – and of course diverse high-speed network connectivity .
Fortunately , the cost of fibre connectivity has declined rapidly in recent years allowing the data centre industry to build highly secure facilities well away from capital city locations where power is becoming constrained and real estate is expensive . No longer having to cluster round the major telecom exchanges due to the previously high connectivity costs has helped to achieve this move .
The cloud effect The cloud is already , and will continue to be a major dictator of the look and feel of future data centres . As demand for public , private and hybrid cloud environments continues to grow , a data centre must deliver the enhanced levels of predictability and security that users will expect . Hybrid clouds are predicted to be the model selected by the majority of enterprises as long as latency and connectivity can be delivered .
Many organisations still and will always demand the peace of mind of retaining private cloud infrastructure for managing core business applications . A company might be happy enough using an Internet-based public cloud development platform for testing new applications , but not once it goes into production . Not only that , there are valuable on premise legacy systems and equipment that just can ’ t be virtualised .
With all these factors in mind , there will be a place for both public and private clouds and users are already pushing back on their providers to find solutions that give them the best of all worlds ; a service that can connect all environments as if they were a single entity . By offering private clouds combined with public cloud services , hybrid has the potential to enable a unified , automated , and wellmanaged computing environment .
As far as the data centre is concerned , along with power , a vital requirement for future cloud performance will be the provision of more diverse and redundant connectivity . The quality and type of connectivity is already often overlooked and if not properly addressed will result in inconsistent performance , poor user experience and lack of security between public and private cloud environments . There ’ s not only the concern around latency to address , but the cost of connectivity also needs to be considered .
This is why many enterprises building hybrid solutions are increasingly demanding their private clouds to be as
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