Small may be beautiful in the datacentre

Datacentres of the future may go small and hyperlocal, suggests Chris Gonsalves

When it comes to datacentres, we've all seen trends come and go, from homegrown to massive to eco-friendly. But the prevalence of the cloud and the shifting way that consumers use data may be pushing things in a new direction.

Tomorrow's datacentre might be quite a bit smaller and right next door.

That's one conclusion of a new survey of 800 datacentre professionals by power and infrastructure vendor Emerson Network Power. According to the report, Data Center 2025: Exploring the Possibilities, consumers want lots of reliable and accessible content, and this will force providers to house data closer to end users, putting the squeeze on mid-size datacentres.

"As consumers continue to rely on 24/7 mobile access, network boundaries as they are known today will evolve," suggested Emerson Network Power business leader Scott Barbour. "Shifting storage and compute requirements will lead the industry to adopt a more flexible datacentre ecosystem and simplify the way we access business data on the go."

Barbour and his team predicted the growing demand for storage and access will result in a transition of traffic loads to small-scale data locations. More than 30 per cent of survey participants said they expect small datacentres to be embedded in neighbourhood settings by 2025.

Fifty-eight per cent said datacentres will be roughly half the size of current facilities, or smaller, within that same time frame.

The respondents also said that nearly two-thirds (60 per cent) of telecoms companies will become or converge with colocation data facilities as a result of this new efficiency-based datacentre management approach.

Getting data closer to where it will be consumed is a significant issue when it comes to sorting out the bandwidth and backhaul limitations that can slow cloud applications and related initiatives, for example to do with the Internet of Things.

That's a big part of the so-called "fog computing" approach being championed by Cisco that pushes data, processing and applications to the network edge.

Cisco sees fog expanding the use of internet-connected devices by pushing the reams of data being created and crunched out to edge and end user devices like set-top boxes and routers.
The vendor earlier this year even released a mashup of Linux and its own IOS operating system dubbed IOx, specifically designed to run self-contained applications of networked devices.

"Think about the idea that every single bit of data [has] to be backhauled to a cloud-based application so it can be analysed," Cisco's senior director of IoT products and solutions marketing Roberto De La Mora wrote in a blog post introducing IOx.

"We are going to run into the 'data gravity' issue pretty fast. You can put all your data somewhere, but as it grows in size it becomes very expensive to move it around.

"It's becoming very clear that the IoT requires a different computing model, one that enables distributed processing of data with the level of resilience, scale, speed, and mobility that is required to efficiently and effectively deliver the value that the data that is being generated can create when properly processed across the network."

And so the respondents to Emerson's survey agreed, whether they had designs on IoT implementations or were just concerned about sharing the road with cloud applications.

In addition to going smaller and more local, key findings in the Emerson report mirrored the concerns about cost, reliability and availability of data.

There was a prediction that 20 per cent of the energy used by datacentres in the next decade will come from alternative fuel sources, with solar being the most prevalent technology, followed by nuclear, natural gas and wind power.

Roughly 43 per cent of survey participants said that by 2025 datacentres will have self-healing and predictive maintenance capabilities and will use remote management tools to solve problems.

"The datacentre of 2025 certainly won't be one datacentre," said 451 Research vice president Andy Lawrence. "The analogy I like to use is to transport. On the road, we see sports cars and family cars; we see buses and we see trucks. They have different kinds of engines, different types of seating and different characteristics in terms of energy consumption and reliability. We are going to see something similar in the datacentre world.

"In fact, that is already happening, and I expect it to continue."

Chris Gonsalves is vice president of editorial at Channelnomics

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