Critical infrastructure specialists Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, has released five data centre trends to watch for in 2016, focusing on key patterns impacting the regional market.
“Data centre technologies are emerging and evolving at an astounding pace,” says Anand Sanghi, President of Asia, Emerson Network Power.
“Our customers in Asia are investing in upgrading their legacy infrastructure while driving innovation to deliver more value-added services.
“Bimodal IT, software-defined networking, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are impacting traditional system architectures and we are seeing changes at both the core/cloud as well as the edge of the network.
“We have also seen rapid adoption of modular and containerised data centre solutions by telecom operators seeking agility; as well as growing demand by our hyper-scale and co-location customers for high-efficiency power and cooling infrastructure and data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) to optimise performance.”
Here are Sanghi’s five trends that are shaping the data centre landscape in 2016 and beyond:
Cloud gets complicated
Most organisations are now using cloud computing to some degree.
The evolution from SaaS to true hybrid environments, in which cloud services are used to bring greater agility to legacy facilities, continues to advance as more organisations move to a bimodal architecture.
“Rather than stabilising, however, cloud could get more complex,” Sanghi suggests.
“The latest server utilisation research, conducted by Stanford’s Jonathan Koomey and Anthesis Group’s Jon Taylor, found that enterprise data centre servers still only deliver, on average, between five and 15 per cent of their maximum computing output over the course of a year.
“In addition, 30 per cent of physical servers are ‘comatose’, meaning they have not delivered computing services in six months or more.
“The push to identify and remove comatose servers will continue to build momentum and is an essential step in managing energy consumption; however, the potential for unused data centre capacity to become part of a shared-service, distributed cloud computing model will also be explored, enabling enterprise data centres to sell their excess capacity on the open market.”
Architecture trumps technology
While data centre technology plays an important role in ensuring efficiency and availability, data centre operators are focusing less on technology and more on the architectures in which those technologies are deployed.
“We are seeing more customers - who in the past would have defaulted to a traditional Tier 3 or Tier 4 power architecture - coming to us and asking for help in defining the right architecture for their environment,” adds Peter Panfil, Vice president of global power, Emerson Network Power.
“They have confidence in the technology - that’s become a given.
