As data demands continue to increase and more devices become smart and connected, the data centre will play an even more pivotal role in the future.
So says AJ Hartenberg, portfolio manager for data centre services at T-Systems SA, who points out that hosted, shared and virtualised data centre solutions offer organisations access to new and innovative services while addressing the combined pressures of reducing cost, improving agility and scalability, and as a result, will continue to grow in popularity in future.
According to recent IDC research, installed service provider data centre capacity consumed by the Internet of things (IOT) will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.
Without question, IDC notes, IOT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger data centres, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. The agility and scale required in IOT deployments will ensure much of that data centre capacity ends up residing in service provider data centres, it adds.
"Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IOT service platform requirements at the level of the data centre itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices," says Rick Villars, IDC's vice-president for data centre and cloud.
Hartenberg believes the data centre has become one of the most critical infrastructure elements in the modern business.
"As requirements and technology have evolved, so too has the data centre, and a number of trends are currently evident around this business-critical solution. The over-arching trend affecting data centres currently is a move away from organisations owning their own physical data centre infrastructure," he says.
This is a result of a number of challenges, including cost, rapidly evolving technology, security concerns and others, he notes, adding the "data centre of today and the future paints a vastly different picture to this technology in the past, and we are sure to see further evolution in years to come".
Virtualisation of infrastructure is also on the increase, whether in on premises or shared and hosted data centres, as software-defined data centres come to the fore, he observes. By adopting software-defined services in a shared data centre, he adds, organisations can now access a variety of technology, from storage and servers to backup and recovery solutions from a service provider or multiple service providers without the requirement to build, manage or maintain their own infrastructure.
In addition, says Hartenberg, as a result of cost and economy pressures, organisations that do require their own physical data centre infrastructure are adopting modular solutions that can be easily deployed and self-powered.
"Many organisations still require ownership of certain functional areas, making hosted or virtualised data centre services impractical. However, the challenge of the physical construction of infrastructure remains. Pre-built, containerised modular data centres are thus emerging as an alternative solution."
He explains these data centres are pre-built and then assembled on site in a matter of a couple of months, rather than the years it has taken in the past to build a traditional data centre.
"Furthermore, supplementary capacity can be incorporated with the addition of another data centre container module, improving data centre agility and scalability."
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