EDITOR’S QUESTION
hardware, most added equipment to it
every time a system or process changed.
This often resulted in lots of required
physical space, high energy bills and
environmental concerns in the eventual
decommission of such centres, or parts
of them.
Yet with the advent of technologies
developing so quickly that both they and
consumer needs require adaptation on an
almost daily basis, such clunky and quirky
architecture has been rendered almost
useless: businesses need to be able to
pivot rather than persevere and act in an
agile fashion.
This has seen the most recent data
centres trend be for them to change
their core entirely. Instead of bespoke
product catalogues physically stationed
a reasonable distance from a company’s
head office, cloud-based data centres
are universal and rely on a shared
infrastructure to realise economies of
scale as quickly as possible.
MAT JORDAN, HEAD
OF EMEA – PROCURRI
EUROPE
loud computing has
been a revolutionary
development in
information technology
and has already
transformed the way
that both businesses and individuals work
with their data and devices.
C
For consumers, social media and video
streaming are the most popular applications
but for businesses, there’s really room for
all aspects of their IT to be completely
changed and streamlined to become faster,
more efficient and more secure.
One such opportunity – albeit an
extremely large one – is for data centres to
move from physical premises to the cloud.
Cisco estimates that by 2021, 95% of total
data centre traffic will be cloud-based;
yet realistically we see businesses acting
sluggish in making the move across.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Devices that are stored physically are
uniform, designed to be easily replaced by
others and to re-route traffic in the event
of a failure. The knock-on impact of this is
that this equipment is cheaper and more
efficient to heat, cool and store.
The cloud has, and will continue to,
impact data centres in many ways. First
and foremost is that of data centre
architecture. Long considered to be large
collections of bulky and often dated
CLOUD-BASED
DATA CENTRES ARE
UNIVERSAL AND
RELY ON A SHARED
INFRASTRUCTURE
TO REALISE
ECONOMIES OF
SCALE AS QUICKLY
AS POSSIBLE.
However, as the cloud contains more and
more data and the focus is taken away
from devices and hardware, fewer items
in data centres are required. Agility is
favoured over capacity and so the reliance
is less on physicality, more on adaptability
– which in itself fits nicely into cloud-
based services.
How the cloud will go on to effect data
centre architecture, operations and
usage is anyone’s guess, but one thing
is for certain: businesses need to be
reconsidering their current set-up in
favour of moving to a more adaptable
model that is able to continually evolve to
meet customer and business needs.
Procurri’s teams are at the forefront of
such developments and so are able to
not just advise but also tangibly help in
identifying, procuring and moving toward
new data centre solutions.
Issue 05
31