INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
A next-generation data centre for
a next-generation world
The global data centre
services market is expected
to register a compound
annual growth rate of
13.69% during the 2019
to 2024 period, reflecting
their importance in a
digitally-driven business
environment. As part of
this, hyperconverged
infrastructure (HCI)
will provide further
impetus as more
companies shift towards a
multi-cloud approach.
The focus on HCI reflects the growing
momentum around the movement
to embrace software-defined IT
architecture as a more effective way of
overcoming the limitations of traditional
hardware-defined systems.
However, the combined opportunities
provided by data centres and HCI have
resulted in an increasingly crowded market
where companies are finding it challenging
to differentiate between the various service
provider offerings.
Understanding convergence
“Hyperconvergence has been getting
a lot of airtime and for a good reason.
It provides organisations with more
user-friendly and cost-effective ways
to manage their cloud environments
as opposed to traditional data centre
architectures. Providing improved agility
over the expensive and difficult to maintain
architecture of the past, HCI ensures the
IT infrastructure of the organisation is
closely aligned to its strategic business
deliverables,” said Daniel Thenga, NetApp
Technical BDM at Comstor.
Finding the right service provider or
solution set that best meets the unique
organisational needs is therefore critical
to help drive growth and create
competitive differentiation.
“From a top-line perspective, decision
makers should apply criteria such as
scalability, feature set, ease of use,
flexibility, the partner ecosystem and
the total cost of ownership as part of
their process to find the ideal fit. Further
impacting this, is how the HCI and data
centre environment supports the growth of
Edge Computing and the Internet of Things
along with the associated increase in data
points. Being able to integrate all these
aspects effectively must be a priority
as companies rely more on finding value in
their data than ever before,” added Thenga.
Gaining value
At its core, HCI is managed centrally by
a single piece of software. So, storage,
computing and virtual machines are all
managed by the same application. But as
companies are getting used to HCI, there
is already a movement to extend beyond
that with disaggregated hyperconverged
infrastructure (dHCI).
This allows customers to scale in a nonlinear
fashion. In other words, companies
can consolidate workloads and deliver
private clouds with public cloud simplicity
while moderating application licensing with
consistent management between clouds.
Thenga said: “As technologies continue to
evolve, companies are under pressure to do
more with less. HCI and dHCI innovations
give them more effective ways to unlock
the value of data centres while giving them
the flexibility to easily move between cloud
models as their business needs change.”
Introducing intelligence
All this is contributing to how the data centre
is being used. While some might have only
used it as a storage repository or, at best,
a way to collaborate between branches,
the next-generation data centre delivers
more value through the high-performance
computing capabilities delivered to its users.
“Take Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an
example. Leveraging the power of data
centres, AI delivers invaluable automation
and Machine Learning capabilities to
organisations across industries irrespective
of their size,” said Thenga. •
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