Johannesburg, 04 May 2016
When it comes to the modern data centre, thoughts turn to physical buildings. Yet, Andre Schoeman, data centre specialist at Neotel, believes that serving the data needs of a company has evolved to much more than that.
"Even though the physical infrastructure still has a vital role to play, many of the recent trends have centred around the cloudification of data. In South Africa, there is a concerted effort to migrate data into the cloud whether it is a public, private, or hybrid model," he says.
But let us consider first the changes that have been occurring around the bricks-and-mortar aspects of the data centre.
"Firstly, thoughts have to turn towards power density (the amount of power that gets pushed into the facility). So even though the size of equipment has shrunk, it still requires a vast amount of power. Those facilities built more than a decade ago have a very low power density and cannot effectively run modern systems at optimal levels while still keeping them cool," says Schoeman.
However, to properly run a data centre you need good power and lots of it. While large organisations can certainly afford to go this route, for SMEs in South Africa this is often not a viable route. One of the biggest challenges we face is to get reliable power at a reasonable price point.
"Because of this, much emphasis has been placed on moving away from smaller facilities. The scaled infrastructure of massive data centres provide customers with a much more compelling value proposition. It just runs much more efficiently at a larger scale than what a smaller environment is able to contend with."
So how does this shift latch up to the cloudification of data?
"As soon as an organisation removes the small data centres at branch offices, it is in a position to centralise data and embarking on an exercise of building a private cloud environment. The cloud provides a viable option on the efficiency portion of the data centre and far outweighs what can be done on in-house physical systems," he says.
Moreover, Schoeman believes that the cloud provides local SMEs with reliable, safe, and secure computing.
"For smaller business to pay hundreds of thousands of rand in data centre fees is useless. The probability of an SME effectively using that expensive toy is very low. There is a realisation that what you need is reliable computing that provides uptime and security of data. This can be provided by a virtualised environment which does not require massive amounts of capital expenses."
Today, with the cloud being what it is, SMEs can enter the virtual environment at a fraction of the cost. As they grow, they can simply buy more resources for their needs. And as the cost of bandwidth has fallen dramatically over the years, one of the biggest obstacles to the cloud has been removed.
"SMEs now have an ideal platform to enter into the cloud and embrace a different way of approaching their data centre needs - one that is more affordable and ultimately more effective for a digital way of doing business," concludes Schoeman.
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