Data centre technology is impacted by the same drivers as the rest of the ICT sector. Trends such as 5G, IOT, as-a-Service and environmental awareness are all expected to impact the data centre. Naturally, the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown have also had an impact.
Jason Osner, Sale Manager at Rittal South Africa, lists five key data centre trends that he expects to come to the fore in 2021.
1. Energy conservation and cooling. Osner believes there will be increased focus on energy conervation measures in data centres. Energy is ever an issue in South Africa, with costs escalating and the power utility Eskom forecasting up to stage 8 loadshedding for 2021. “Climate control (cooling) is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the datacentre. Businesses should consider implementing a green IT infrastructure that’ll use less energy without compromising on cooling capacity, while also being scalable (ie modular) to accommodate future demands on the data centre.”
2. Modular, flexible systems are key. Osner says it’s important to have scalable solutions so that the customer can start out with a small solution at the outset of their business, and as the business grows and the requirements of its IT infrastructure grow, it’s possible to add more racks and monitoring to the solution, ultimately evolving into a massive data centre. “We’ve already identified this trend with many of our customers, with growth happening continuously on an annual basis.”
3. 5G and IoT continue to drive demand for Edge computing. There’s an increasing need for decentralised data centres, says Osner. “Many small- and medium-sized businesses used to keep servers and even entire racks on-premises, which were operated and maintained by their IT staff. As offices started to close owing to the lockdown, businesses were forced to move their hardware to proper data centres and interest in colocation services has increased significantly.”
The trend to colocation has escalated over the past few years, with many companies moving their IT systems to colocated or even cloud-based data centres. This eliminates all overheads, costs, and risk for the client. The data is also protected with it being remote and off-site. Colocation has been a big drive across all industries.
4. Cloud storage is essential to every business. As data volumes grow – driven by 5G and IOT - it’s just not possible to store all of this data in an on-site data centre. Not only will this place undue pressure on the company’s infrastructure, it will cost a fortune. There’s a growing trend towards companies migrating their data to the cloud – and even in multi-cloud environments, in some instances. Cloud environments typically come with everything-as-a-service, freeing up companies to focus on their core business.
5. Data driven monitoring. The servicing and support of data centres is of the utmost importance, says Osner. “We have had customers that don’t maintain or service their product and when the product eventually fails owing to lack of maintenance, the risk is high that the customer will suffer down time or even some of their servers being damaged. To defend against this, service level agreements (SLAs) are key when it comes to IT equipment and maintaining the integratory of the product as well as predicting failure before it happens.
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