Subscribe

Hyper-scale data centres look to F1 race cars

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 22 Jul 2015
Businesses must adopt the same mentality as F1 cars, says Stephen Green, MEA executive: data centre business unit, Dimension Data.
Businesses must adopt the same mentality as F1 cars, says Stephen Green, MEA executive: data centre business unit, Dimension Data.

Modern hyper-scale data centres should be like Formula 1 race cars which are all about speed, leveraging technology, agility, adaptability and continuous improvement.

So said Stephen Green, MEA executive: data centre business unit, Dimension Data, yesterday during the Data Centres: The Next Frontier 2015 conference, at The Forum in Bryanston.

Green explained modern F1 cars are making use of technologies like big data, high performance computing, computer-aided drafting, computational fluid dynamics, Internet of things as well as telemetry among others, to stay ahead of competition.

Thus, he believes that businesses must adopt the same mentality if they are to be fast and shrug off competition.

Describing how businesses should be fast, Green quoted Klaus Schwab: founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, saying: "In the new world it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it's the fast fish which eats the slow fish."

He said today most organisations are facing the challenge of siloed architectures in their data centres whereby they manually provision each application. "These processes also involve many people, many steps, many weeks and are error-prone."

Green pointed out IDC has research that shows the average age of a data centre is nine years.

He added these data centres usually have aging infrastructure, have 'orphan' applications which lack support, have power and cooling issues, and for the majority of organisations, investment in virtualisation is not yet paying off.

Besides, he added, the networks cannot handle virtual machines in the same manner. Modern businesses should aim at driving transformation and the data centre should be at the heart of that transformation, Green said.

Highlighting the drivers for data centre transformation, he pointed to the increasing demand for IT services and innovation to differentiate in business, pressure on IT costs, IT governance complexity, and the need for better alignment between IT and business.

"The challenge for today's CIO is how to continue delivering the services the business wants while also aggressively driving down costs. Business now needs IT operations to support a 30 times increase in application release frequency."

According to Green, cloud computing is also redefining the data centre as it brings new levels of efficiency and utilisation, as well as new operational processes.

He notes data centre networks are going through massive upheaval with software-defined networking and this creates a unique advantage for companies.

"Converged infrastructures are the most rapidly growing technology inside the data centre but the reality is you cannot close the business case for converged infrastructures without collapsing at least one layer out of the network and many integrators struggle with the network layer."

Share