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The IT infrastructure of a company is growing in importance for businesses of all sizes. It is vital that IT elements are kept up-to-date and running as smoothly as possible. Servers and storage equipment must run efficiently to ensure they process and store company data correctly while catering to its IT infrastructure needs.
These requirements are set to increase in importance as major trends such as big data, mobility, bring your own device (BYOD), cloud computing, the internet of things and software-defined IT change the remit of IT and the infrastructure it requires. This is compelling businesses of all sizes, in a wide variety of industries and sectors, to re-examine and alter their approach to data centres and how they go about creating, storing, analysing and moving the data they possess.
For many companies and engineers, this means keeping up with the latest developments within the sphere of data centres, in order to meet the current demands and to fulfil the expected needs in the long-term, as future proofing a business is crucial in today's fast-paced environment.
So, what does the future hold for data centres and everything involved in their construction, such as the data cabinets and the cabling that connects?
Hardware changes
Much of the hardware changes set to come about in the coming years are, in the most part, down to the fact IT departments are now required to support a wide range of new applications and systems while running traditional workloads more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Sumir Bhatia, general manager of enterprise solutions for Dell South Asia, explained that data centres now need to have flexibility built into them to meet a wide variety of needs, while also being able to handle usage spikes.
He believes that greater simplicity in the solution stack, the physical infrastructure and the tools used to monitor and manage operations are required.
"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," he stated.
The growth of converged infrastructures
More and more data centres are choosing a converged infrastructure approach where operational silos, that now exist for servers, network functions and storage, will give way to unified architecture.
Mr Bhatia noted that this approach will be taken in a host of major projects, with many organisations and operations making it their aim to extend the concept of converged infrastructure to encompass the entire data centre and all its components.
Eric Sheppard, IDC’s storage research director, recently said: “Once again we witnessed an increasing number of organisations around the world leveraging integrated systems to address long-standing data centre infrastructure inefficiencies. As such, this market remains one of the fastest-growing segments of the overall infrastructure market.”
Cabling changes
In a bid to make data centres more efficient and cost effective, it is thought that Category 8 cables are set to become mainstream. The newly-introduced cabling technology is the very latest development in the twisted-pair copper data communications.
It is hoped the introduction of Cat8 will make data centres operate more efficiently, as data can be transferred four times quicker via the new cabling, than its predecessor.
All suggestions point to the fact Cat8 copper is an excellent, future-proof solution for current and upcoming generations of active equipment. Although distance issues have been raised with the new technology, these limitations are not a concern in traditional data centres. The latest trends and new components indicate that when planning a new data centre, or an upgrade to a current installation, it will be possible to make a cost-effective choice, while building in flexibility, reliability and scalability for the future.
