Ankesh Kumar, director – Product Management (Channel, IT Solution) and Marketing at Emerson Network Power India, has shared some of the hot trends to watch out in the Indian data center market in 2016 and beyond.
Indians are now witnessing to a digital revolution unheralded just a decade earlier — driven partly by the aggressive growth of our economy and some much needed investment in terms of IT infrastructure and digitalization by the government’s plans to make India digitally equipped, this move towards digitization is fundamentally changing how the government will function in the near future.
Today both, businesses as well as the government both look to connect with an increasingly digitally savvy population and the amount of data being generated is increasing by the hour. Considering that the management of data has never been so critical before, the need to manage this data is on the rise and we are seeing innovation on many fronts in the datacenter landscape. Some of these will make tremendous impact on businesses in 2016.
India’s telecom sector has seen an unprecedented growth over the past decade on account of regulatory liberalization, structural reforms and competition. Our telecommunications market is currently the second largest in the world and its growth curve has been impressive in the recent years.
In fact, a recent report released by GSMA in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group suggests that the mobile-savvy economy will contribute approximately $400 billion to India’s gross domestic product (GDP). This, in conjunction with the growth of smartphone penetration in India and the proliferating base of internet users has resulted in an increase in data generation, which has to be managed and arranged systematically with a datacenter.
The rate at which data is being generated is going to increase over the years and thus telecommunication companies will have to make provision to store it to maintain a competitive edge. For most telecoms, in the wake of increasing productization occurring in their IT spaces, a new market for new data center infrastructure design options is surfacing.
Trends that will shape the data center landscape in 2016 and beyond
Modular data centers will see a rise in adoption-especially in telecom sector
The lines between telecommunications and IT industries are blurring as data, video, voice and app-based services are being consumed on a regular basis on the same device. Understandably the data passing through their networks is increase and depending on the volume, telecoms will need to add storage space on a regular basis to ensure that there is enough space for existing data as well as new data which is fed in the system.
This will lead to the rise in adoption of modular datacenters since speed of deployment is of paramount importance. Such datacenters provide cost and energy efficient datacenter space with a rapid deployment timeframe. Modular datacenter design enables telecoms to gain a stronger handle on their bottom line by anticipating costs more accurately thus reducing overheads for Capex required for building a datacenter from scratch. This ultimately translates to lower costs to their customers, which is always good news for business.
Cloud will get complicated as energy management demands grow
Most organizations now use cloud computing to some degree with the evolution from SaaS to true hybrid environments. Today cloud services are used to bring greater agility to legacy facilities, continues to advance as more organizations move to a bimodal architecture. Rather than stabilizing, however, cloud could get more complex.
A recent research, conducted by Stanford’s Jonathan Koomey and Anthesis Group’s Jon Taylor, found that enterprise data center servers only deliver, on average, between five and 15 percent of their maximum computing output over the course of a year. As energy costs escalate, the push to identify and remove comatose servers will continue to build momentum considering this will be an essential step in managing energy consumption. The visible shift however will be in exploring the potential of cloud to take over unused data center capacity as a part of a shared-service, distributed cloud computing model. This model will enable enterprise data centers to sell their excess capacity on the open market.
Data centers find a common language
The Internet of Things (IoT) will impact data center management. As the volume of data that needs processing and analysis increases, a common challenge comes in the form of managing multiple iterations and versions of operating software used to connect and manage the datacenters.
Today’s data centers include thousands of devices that speak a host of languages, including IPMI, SNMP, and Mod Bus, creating gaps between systems that limit efforts to manage them holistically. In 2016 as more companies come to realize the power of interconnectivity across datacenter platforms that enable new levels of visibility, control and automation, we will see the wider adoption of open systems specifications like Redfish.
Datacenters will add carbon to their credit
Though organizations have been on the lookout for increasing efficiency in datacenters since at least 2007, the focus has largely been financial. As energy costs escalate and organizations come to terms with understanding how datacenters can become massive energy guzzlers, businesses will shift their focus from efficiency to sustainability and view the carbon footprint of their data centers through a social responsibility lens now that the price of renewable energy sources including solar sees a decline.
Data center operations — including carbon footprint, alternative energy use and equipment disposal will be bundled as a part of corporate responsibility statements. The impact of this trend will not be limited to on-premise technology decisions. To be meaningful, reporting must include the full data center ecosystem, including colocation and cloud providers. As this practice grows, sustainability will rise to the level of availability and security as must-have attributes of a high performing data center.
Even with newer standards and technology, security will still need to save the day
Cloud computing, virtualization, IoT and even SDN will introduce newer complexities into the maintenance of datacenters. With industry and compliance regulations raising the bar higher about how data is being processed and analyzed, expect security and privacy threats to be on the rise in the datacenter. It will thus become imperative to include security by design into the working of DCIM solutions. Having a clear picture of what data is being used where and for what scope would be key to implementing the right security measures for datacenter. Expect CSOs or CTOs to take on greater responsibility inside the organization as they become chief enablement officers for data by helping catalyze business productivity securely.
By Ankesh Kumar, director – Product Management (Channel, IT Solution) and Marketing at Emerson Network Power India
editor@infotechlead.com
