More data centres are moving to the edge amid a proliferation of data and a need for more speed and less latency, according to experts addressing the Vertiv Accelerate 2023 roadshow, staged in Sandton last week.
CIOs and data centre managers attending the event said their biggest data centre concerns were load shedding, cooling, power management, costs and skills shortages. These overlapped with global priorities, which also included scaling and creating sufficient capacity, enabling speed, and aligning with sustainability goals.
Pierre Havenga, MD of Vertiv Middle East & Africa, said: “Globally and in the MEA region, we are seeing organisations facing the challenge of looking three to five years ahead and creating the capacity that will be needed, within operating cost targets and optimum efficiency to comply with sustainability targets. Another priority is speed – both in deployment and connectivity, and with this is standardisation, which supports speed and interconnectivity.”
Havenga noted that massive data centre growth was coming to Africa as demand soared and more cables landed on the continent adding more connectivity and drastically reducing latency.
The edge is coming, so the challenge is: how do we manage that environment and deploy at speed?
Jon Abbott, Vertiv EMEA.
Jon Abbott, technologies director & industry advisory, Strategic Clients EMEA at Vertiv, said global data volumes were now nearing Yottabyte levels. “The data growth is exponential – it’s not linear,” he said. “At the same time, speed, bandwidth and latency have become important.”
Abbott said the changing environment was impacting operations and technologies. “Processing is moving closer to the end user to address latency and speed, we see open source groups to commoditise and standardise technologies, and a new ecosystem of private networks,” he said.
He said that decentralised architecture was driving some function migration from the core into the field.
Haroun De Almeida, AC power technical solutions manager at Vertiv, said: “The edge is coming, so the challenge is: how do we manage that environment and deploy at speed?” He outlined edge archetypes such as the Micro Edge and Distributed Edge, noting that traditional data centre deployment models would not be fast enough to manage demand for edge deployments at speed.
“When edge hits, customers will need standardised and pre-integrated solutions, consistency in architecture, continuity and resilience, compliance, energy efficiency, remote and central monitoring capabilities, and rapid deployment,” he said.
Vertiv showcased its infrastructure solutions to support modular edge deployments and address the top priorities of data centre managers. Vertiv’s smart solutions are fast to deploy, self-optimising, 30% more power efficient than traditional data centres, and can be deployed in ordinary rooms, said De Almeida.
Wojtek Piorko, sales director at Vertiv Africa, highlighted real-life case studies illustrating how three organisations were able to address their challenges and elevate their data infrastructure strategy and offerings with solutions such as the new SmartCabinet, SmartRow and SmartMod solutions.
Modular approch
In a panel discussion on data centre optimisation, Abbott, Richard van der Walt, data centre architect at FNB South Africa, and Glenn Holmes, CEO of TechAccess, noted that data centres were becoming more agile and required less space.
Van der Walt said: “You need to be more dynamic now, looking at modular building blocks and growing as you need to. For some organisations – such as financial services – the edge could bring complexity and risk. However, in a discussion around edge vs local data centers vs cloud, it’s very much a case of ‘horses for courses’. We may see an emergence of hybrid data centre models in future.”
Holmes said: “Virtualisation has shrunk the amount of space needed, so now you might find just ten racks in a large, empty data centre that needs to be cooled at unnecessary cost. Organisations need to measure their power and cooling to manage costs. Now, there is a tendency for data centres to over-cool, because managers are concerned about outages.”
Havenga concluded that while no data centre manager had a crystal ball to predict future needs in a changing environment, they had to design data centres keeping in mind their operating cost targets.
“That’s why the modular approach works – you need to spend the money closer to when you actually need the infrastructure. You need to consider – what is the load going to be, and what is the end game?” he said.
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