DATA CENTRE PREDICTIONS
WHAT’S NEXT FOR
THE DATA CENTRE –
FIVE KEY TRENDS
Faster, more scalable,
easier to manage… as
data centres evolve
towards near organic
levels of complexity,
nature may have lessons
for the IT industry.
Industry experts from
Mellanox Technologies,
Apstra and NetFoundry
offer their insights into
the key trends set to
shape the data centre of
the future.
E
nterprise IT looks with envy at the
‘hyperscale’ data centres powering
Internet giants like Amazon Web
Services, Facebook, Microsoft and Alibaba.
These contain hundreds of thousands of
powerful computers (servers) connected by
thousands of miles of network cable through
tens of thousands of networking devices
such as switches and routers. Google is
estimated to have 900,000 servers across
its 13 data centres worldwide, using enough
electricity to power 200,000 homes. Have
more modest sized companies any chance
to compete in such a world?
It is encouraging to discover that nature has
structures that make today’s hyperscalers
look puny. And there are lessons to be
learned from the way nature achieves this.
There is one city in Northern Brazil so
enormous that it dwarfs any human
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
Issue 08
17