Data Centres: The Year Ahead
Historically, the data centre market may well have been viewed as somewhat cautious. However, 2017 looks set to see a major shift in focus, with significant implications for the technologies that enterprise CIOs are looking to harness. According to Gartner, the Indian data centre infrastructure market totalled $2 billion in 2016, a 5.2 per cent increase from 2015, and is set to continue this trend throughout 2017. To add to that, the Indian government’s recent push towards a digitally-enabled economy is likely to fuel further spending and expansion. So how will this manifest itself over the next 12 months?
At first glance, it may appear to be business as usual for the data centre. The trends of continued virtualisation of workloads, legacy integration and the quest for greater performance and capacity will indeed continue. However, there are changes afoot. Beyond that, we will see how increasing acceptance of the public cloud as a key component of digital transformation will present IT departments with a fresh set of challenges. The same must go for the growth in Big Data, the Internet of Things, process automation - a high priority in the Indian datacentre right now - and other technologies widely accredited as being essential for the digital business.
Addressing data centre modernisation
2017 must, and will, see the industry address storage matters. Data centre modernisation, consolidation, backup and disaster recovery are some of the key drivers in the Indian market, and they are likely to remain relevant drivers way beyond 2017. The year will therefore see a move away from a focus on computational power, to addressing the storage side of the equation. This is largely a result of the Big Data applications and a plethora of data analytic tools that flooded into the data centre throughout 2016.
On the hardware front, this will accelerate the already brisk march towards flash domination over conventional magnetic storage, with enterprises adopting all-flash architectures to both improve performance and eliminate silos. 2017 will also see vendors bring a number of disruptive new technologies to market, such as NVMe and 3D XPoint, able to deliver data at DRAM-like speeds but at flash-like prices.
Although these developments will not happen overnight, they have the ability to significantly improve storage performance and agility, while also driving down operational costs. Enterprises will be empowered to look for
imaginative new storage use cases, to help drive the business forward.
It will also assist in the development of next generation storage solutions to meet a growing need to distribute storage resources, putting data as close as possible to where it’s needed without loss of performance, control or security.
But what will this mean for the once dominant Storage Area Network? Not good news, due to the growing availability of more scalable, alternatives that do not require the management overheads of the SAN approach. Increasing availability, and a widening understanding of the benefits of data analytics within the data centre, also come into play here. 2017 will see the rise of new tools designed to better balance both computing and storage workloads and automate the management of that process across a mix of platforms.
The end as we know it?
This mix of platforms that enterprise IT will need to embrace will increasingly include the public cloud. While many have declared the end of the data centre for many years now, could this really signal the end of the corporate data centre as we know it? Undoubtedly the complexity of building and managing an on-premise infrastructure outpaces the ability of the IT department to contain it. However, the enterprise is unlikely to give up on the data centre and there are clear signs that a hybrid approach will not only prevail throughout 2017, but will become the norm for enterprise IT.
Vendors are coming to recognise this trend, even Amazon which once maintained that no one needed an on-premise data centre at all, but has since changed that stance and made it easier to migrate and balance workloads across public and private domains. Converged hardware vendors are integrating public cloud technologies into their products with the aim of enabling enterprises to take full advantage of the instant scalability and pay-as-you-use economics of the public cloud, but without relinquishing the ownership, control and security afforded by on-premise alternatives.
The utility era of enterprise IT
Last, but by no means least, we are now finally seeing clear signs that progress is being made to tackle the inherent complexity of the hybrid approach, both at the infrastructure, application and business level.
When considering infrastructure, the virtualisation technologies which were successfully applied to the management of compute resources are now being extended to do the same for storage and networking. Products and technologies are maturing rapidly, with 2017 set to be the year that the software-defined data centre (SDDC) finally becomes a reality.
Additionally, much progress has been made when it comes to managing application workloads and, by leveraging data analytics, the development of sophisticated business-level automation tools. This could well be the start of the much anticipated “utility” era of enterprise IT, as these tools enable organisations to define in pure business terms the policies by which they want their digital systems to be monitored, managed and measured. More than that, they can then be executed by smart software regardless of the platforms involved - whether in the on-premise data centre, on externally hosted public cloud services - to deliver the IT the businesses want, wherever and whenever they need it. The best part is that businesses can now experience the cloud-like experience on their on-premise data centre, alongside with some chosen applications and data to be placed on the public cloud. It’s about time for organisations to be able to enjoy the benefits from both worlds.
It will also assist in the development of next generation storage solutions to meet a growing need to distribute storage resources, putting data as close as possible to where it’s needed without loss of performance, control or security.
Virtualisation technologies which were successfully applied to the management of compute resources are now being extended to do the same for storage and networking
But what will this mean for the once dominant Storage Area Network? Not good news, due to the growing availability of more scalable, alternatives that do not require the management overheads of the SAN approach. Increasing availability, and a widening understanding of the benefits of data analytics within the data centre, also come into play here. 2017 will see the rise of new tools designed to better balance both computing and storage workloads and automate the management of that process across a mix of platforms.
The end as we know it?
This mix of platforms that enterprise IT will need to embrace will increasingly include the public cloud. While many have declared the end of the data centre for many years now, could this really signal the end of the corporate data centre as we know it? Undoubtedly the complexity of building and managing an on-premise infrastructure outpaces the ability of the IT department to contain it. However, the enterprise is unlikely to give up on the data centre and there are clear signs that a hybrid approach will not only prevail throughout 2017, but will become the norm for enterprise IT.
Vendors are coming to recognise this trend, even Amazon which once maintained that no one needed an on-premise data centre at all, but has since changed that stance and made it easier to migrate and balance workloads across public and private domains. Converged hardware vendors are integrating public cloud technologies into their products with the aim of enabling enterprises to take full advantage of the instant scalability and pay-as-you-use economics of the public cloud, but without relinquishing the ownership, control and security afforded by on-premise alternatives.
The utility era of enterprise IT
Last, but by no means least, we are now finally seeing clear signs that progress is being made to tackle the inherent complexity of the hybrid approach, both at the infrastructure, application and business level.
When considering infrastructure, the virtualisation technologies which were successfully applied to the management of compute resources are now being extended to do the same for storage and networking. Products and technologies are maturing rapidly, with 2017 set to be the year that the software-defined data centre (SDDC) finally becomes a reality.
Additionally, much progress has been made when it comes to managing application workloads and, by leveraging data analytics, the development of sophisticated business-level automation tools. This could well be the start of the much anticipated “utility” era of enterprise IT, as these tools enable organisations to define in pure business terms the policies by which they want their digital systems to be monitored, managed and measured. More than that, they can then be executed by smart software regardless of the platforms involved - whether in the on-premise data centre, on externally hosted public cloud services - to deliver the IT the businesses want, wherever and whenever they need it. The best part is that businesses can now experience the cloud-like experience on their on-premise data centre, alongside with some chosen applications and data to be placed on the public cloud. It’s about time for organisations to be able to enjoy the benefits from both worlds.
