Future flexibility
Looking towards the next 18 months, BT’s Fagan said the biggest movement in the industry will be how “the remaining sectors who have not already disengaged from operating on-premise data centres will do so” during that period.
Many of these companies, he said, are still relying on legacy systems “so had good reason to continue with the traditional approach” before now. However, he said confidently that “in time” they will “embrace a specialist data centre provider to realise the benefits of removing such a non-core activity from the business”.
Viatel CEO Piercy said we will “naturally” see the usages for cloud continue to grow in the near future with “more and more services becoming virtualised and offering more flexibility and processing capabilities”.
“Over the past 12 to 16 months, we have seen organisations turn to new and sustainable IT service delivery models in order to address the common data centre issues of energy efficiency, power and cooling. This has all been accelerated by the maturation of cloud computing, widespread virtualisation across the data centre and select and strategic partnering to enhance design and delivery of the modern data centre,” Mark O’Regan, Dell
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Add in increased bandwidth due to the belated dawn of the 4G/long term evolution (LTE) era, higher cable broadband speeds and the move from asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) to “very high speed digital subscriber line” (VDSL) in fixed line services, and Piercy said the industry is facing into a year where “the data centre model has to adopt to all these demands”.
Data centres will, he said, be asked to support all the “bandwidth, low cost power utilisation, low cost cooling and security and protection required” for these changes.
Piercy said this will lead to further developments in terms of the “intelligent data centre”, where customers may end up with “complete control and the solution is modular to grow as customer needs require it”.
Big topic
For Dell data centre specialist, O’Regan the next year will see a demand for power and cooling mechanisms within the data centre to be “flexible enough to keep up with automated, virtualised, dynamic IT while keeping in mind capacity limitations, efficiency, and budgets”.
Outside of that, he added that “the big topic for future computing” in the modern data centre is the concept of a “software defined data centre”. This architectural approach is aimed at decreasing complexity through automating tasks which “are generally done manually in order for the user or provider to be much more efficient with the way they run their environment and deliver their service”.
While looking ahead even further down the road, TE Connectivity’s Waite said the “marketplace in the next five to six years will see 50% of all servers going to be 40 or 100 GB per second-enabled”.
He continued, “Companies should be planning for the faster data rates that are going to be coming out of those servers. Of course what that means is that switches which connect to those severs are going to have to have bigger and fatter pipes coming from them.
“Bring your own cloud has become a natural consequence of BYOD, because end users want an easy way to access data across multiple devices and share with others, so they often rely on third-party cloud platforms like DropBox to do that,” Mark Fagan, BT Ireland
“I tend to think of data as being like water. If you have a city you’ve always got to have a big enough pipe within it to carry around the water that’s needed. Data is like that, as soon as you have servers demanding more and more processing speed they’re going to have bigger and fatter pipes coming from them to cope with the pressure.”
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