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Watch out for five datacenter trends

Mega trends such as big data, mobility, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), cloud computing and software-defined everything are rewriting the rules of information technology (IT)

Catherine Lian (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, August 9, 2014

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Watch out for five datacenter trends

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ega trends such as big data, mobility, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), cloud computing and software-defined everything are rewriting the rules of information technology (IT). Chief information officers are being asked to support new applications and usage models while also handling traditional workloads more efficiently and cost-effectively.

The pressure on IT not only to deliver superior performance on a day-to-day basis, but also to rapidly respond to changes in the business environment is greater now than ever before.

Let'€™s take one example with big data. Business units will increasingly demand capabilities that involve real-time analytics and greater intelligence in their IT operations.

The marketing department may want to deliver sales messages to mobile phones based on a customer'€™s purchasing history, social-media activity, location and other sensor data. But that same marketing department will also want to continue running its conventional customer-relationship management system '€” and dozens of other applications, for that matter, on the same infrastructure.

Datacenters must have the flexibility to meet all these varying needs, and also to handle usage spikes by shifting resource utilization rather than by maintaining costly excess capacity that can go unused for significant amounts of time.

To address these challenges in 2014 and beyond, there needs to be greater simplicity '€” in the solution stack, the physical infrastructure and the tools used to monitor and manage operations.

There is also a need for greater infrastructure agility that offers greater flexibility and scalability beyond what exists today '€” an infrastructure IT can easily configure, provision in incremental blocks and rapidly adapt to changes in the business environments.

The following trends I believe will have an impact on the datacenter.

Hyperscale computing paradigms will enter the mainstream. As web companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are building their own data centers and the technologies within, businesses are paying attention to the flexibility and efficiency these companies have built.

While taking into account the distinct differences between web companies and traditional enterprises, vendors will start to leverage hyperscale design principles as a model to meet broader enterprise needs '€” but in a way that works for each business. In hardware, this will mean greater density, more efficient use of power, more direct-attached storage (DAS) and a greater focus on modularity and scale-out capabilities.

In software, there will be greater use of open-source technologies such as OpenStack, Hadoop and NoSql, which are particularly well suited to handling cloud computing and Big Data. All in all, the line that separates hyperscale from more mainstream enterprise computing will continue to blur.

Converged infrastructure will gain ground. For new projects, more and more datacenters will choose a converged infrastructure approach where the operational silos that now exist for servers, storage and networking functions will give way to a unified architecture. Hardware systems integrated, sold and managed as a single unit.

On the strategic level, many organizations will make it a goal to extend the concept of converged infrastructure to encompass the entire data center with all its heterogeneous components.

Server-side flash will deliver '€œright now'€ experiences. The relationship between servers and storage will continue to evolve as customers across the globe demand instantaneous results '€“ whether it is a webpage that loads instantly or an application to respond in two seconds or less. Flash-cache technology brings the most frequently accessed data closer to the server, thereby minimizing data travel from storage to the server. While point products for flash at the server do exist, organizations will gain more value from integrated server and SAN flash technology to accelerate application performance without sacrificing availability.

Microservers will meet important niche requirements. High density, energy efficiency and a space-saving form factor are the key factors that make this category attractive for tasks that are not extremely compute-intensive. In addition, there are some applications that simply cannot be virtualized and microservers will play an increasing role in these cases.

They are also ideal for managed hosting companies that need to provide customers with physical rather than virtual servers or for cold storage workloads where minimizing cost per GB is critical. Microserver adoption will increase in 2014, especially with continued innovations in 64-bit ARM and x86-based technologies hitting the market this year.

Datacenter management will go increasingly mobile. Managing the data center will remain an utmost priority. The good news is that administrators who not so long ago wore pagers to alert them to datacenter problems will find a growing number of options for monitoring, managing and automating infrastructure hardware from a mobile device.

Actionable alerts, intuitive interfaces and navigation and personalized dashboard views will give administrators the ability to manage the data center anytime, anywhere.

The technology industry is never dull, but we are witnessing some especially exciting times. While the task of managing a data center will never be simple, these trends will move IT management in the direction of greater simplicity, modularity, and efficiency.

We see big things on the horizon for the remainder of 2014.

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Vendors will start to leverage hyperscale design principles as a model to meet broader enterprise needs in a way that works for each business.

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The writer is managing director of Dell Indonesia. The views expressed are her own

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