“Historically we saw a fair degree of inflexibility in the marketplace and a lot of the big wholesale providers would offer eight or ten year deals. Now it’s more likely to be a three-year type deal. A lot of the new players are much more flexible in the way they offer services and we’re seeing the introduction of pay as you go type services.”
Connectivity factor
For many companies, connectivity is and will remain the most important factor influencing the decision on where to house their data. However, according to Roy Illsley, principal analyst with Ovum, geo-politics is also playing an increasing role.
“If you’re in the Middle East and you want to build a data centre in Saudi Arabia but you’ve got customers in Dubai, well the internet doesn’t go between the two countries – it goes via Frankfurt because of the politics in the region – and that isn’t going to change anytime soon,” he said.
“The fact is if you’ve got a load of customers in one area and the network connectivity means that the latency in serving those customers from that location is unacceptable, you’ll have to find one in a better location.”
SDN advent
In terms of how data centres are managed, Illsley thinks the advent of software defined technologies means that things are like to change in the near future.
“The ability to manage change from within the application, to do things more remotely — that’s certainly going to change the type of data centres that you’re going to see, maybe the size to begin with and I think you’re likely to see fewer big sheds as providers try to reach different markets in areas of the world,” he said.
Data protection legislation increasingly mandates that data stays within the country where it is generated, and that means there will be growing demand for smaller data centres, dispersed more plentifully.
“But rather than having to staff them and manage them with local staff, it’s almost certainly the case that data centre owners will operate these remotely, with the fewest number of people on site. In certain geographies you’re going to see the rise of many more small data centres dotted around the globe but the big mega-data centres will still have a place.”
“If you’re doing something that’s got global reach and you want the scale to reach a full region, then a big data centre like Amazon Web Services will be ideal for your business. There will be room for both sizes but I think you will see increasingly which you choose will depend on what you’re trying to do and the market you’re trying to serve.”
Focus change
Others in the industry suggest that there will be other changes in how data centres operate in the future, including a shift from being primarily focused on storage to offering more compute and on-demand access. According to John Schmidt of DatacenterDynamics while previous generations of data centres focused primarily on storage of information and disaster recovery, that’s going to change rapidly.
“Previous generations of data centre focused on the geographic diversity that was required for backup and data was retrieved on a periodic basis. Now the focus has shifted to analysing and processing data for on-demand access. The rise of mobility and wearable technology creates requirements for latency that previously have never been seen,” he said.
“Consumers and business users alike have an expectation of on-demand access to data from the cloud with the same user experience when accessing data residing on the device. This results in data centres that are far more distributed. The most efficient way for most business to do this is with cloud computing.”
Network edge
Schmidt also predicts the rise of edge computing in 2016, where compute power is moved to the edge of the network.
“We are seeing service providers want to push as much computing resources to the edge of the network as possible to reduce latency by reducing the number of ‘hops’ the data has to take in order to reach the end user.
“A large amount of data is shifting from storage to algorithms that manipulate and analyse the data stored. As we use the data, we need to reduce latency. Ten years ago, in the era of programs, you would pull a program up on your laptop that took some time to load and we would look at it for long periods of time a couple of times a day.”
“Now, we have shifted towards an app-driven world where we look at the data hundreds of times a day in shorter durations. Users are starting to feel that data should be predictive and instantly serve up information from the cloud.”
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