Modern Data Centres - Are we ready?

MUMBAI, INDIA: In a latest update, Gartner has highlighted some reasons on why organizations need to develop a more appropriate and modern data center strategy.

As a new digital world emerges from the dual impact of the Nexus of Forces and the Internet of Things, the personality, structure and role of data centers will need to be changed or business agility and competitive strength will be compromised, according to Gartner, Inc.

"For over 40 years, data centers have pretty much been a staple of the IT ecosystem," said Rakesh Kumar, managing vice president at Gartner. "Despite changes in technology for power and cooling, and changes in the design and build of these structures, their basic function and core requirements have, by and large, remained constant. These are centered on high levels of availability and redundancy, strong, well-documented processes to manage change, traditional vendor management and segmented organizational structures. This approach, however, is no longer appropriate for the digital world."

It suggests to make the Data Center behave more like a factory and a laboratory. By 2020, more than seven billion people and businesses, and close to 35 billion devices, will be connected to the Internet. This will result in a significant increase in the speed and volume of data that needs to be handled by data centers. In this sense, data centers will need to behave like theoretical factories with production lines that can scale up to handle ever-increasing volumes of work.

They will also be expected to churn through huge volumes of data to connect applications and allow for better real-time analytics. Therefore, certain parts of the data center need to behave like a laboratory, forensically analyzing this vast ocean of data to provide insight and actions for the business.

Another factor worth considering is the disruption triggered by digital business is fluid and nonstop, with the potential for massive innovation driving significant changes in IT service delivery. In order to deal with these rapid changes, become agile and, at the same time, maintain process-driven integrity and safety of existing systems, many organizations have begun operating in two modes or speeds of IT. Gartner calls this "bimodal IT."

As the core engine delivering IT services, the data center will need to become far more agile and responsive than it has ever been and operate in a bimodal way. Without adapting the mentality and approach of data centers away from continuous stability to managed change and innovation, data center managers will find it increasingly difficult to prove their value.

Traditionally, IT spending has been through IT departments with data centers delivering IT services. This is rapidly changing.

Currently, 38 per cent of total IT spend is outside of IT, with a disproportionate amount in digital projects; by 2017, it will be more than 50 per cent. Lines of businesses will spend with cloud and third-party service providers if they feel their data center is either too slow to respond or too closed to new technologies. As a result, infrastructure & operations leaders must ensure that their internal data centers are able to connect into a broader hybrid topology.