The demands for operational efficiencies, sustainable business operations, dynamic service diversification and cost competitiveness have continued to increase considerably over the last year. This has created a “magnifying glass effect” over the datacentre, which is up against corporate scrutiny as its importance becomes greater than ever.

In the past, the cost of provisioning large–scale, centralised services to hundreds or thousands of users was so prohibitively high that it could only be managed by physically co-locating those required resources in a common place. Today, however, all that has changed. While the role of the datacentre remains much the same as it has always been, the manner in which it fulfills that role is evolving rapidly. To satisfy today’s demands, a dichotomy of sorts emerges in the domain of datacentre architecture and operating philosophy.

There is a convergence under way that is leading to the emergence of what many term the “megascale datacentre,” a centre that provides computing, storage and communications infrastructure on a large-scale basis.At the same time, we see the emergence of distributed and remote datacentre operations in response to the pervasiveness and success of the cloud model. Independent analyst group, Canalys expects datacentre IT infrastructure investment, covering everything from server closets to large datacentres, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to grow from $29 billion in 2010 to $40 billion by 2015. With private and public cloud development expected to fuel datacentre transformation and consolidation, driving the market’s 6% compound annual growth rate. As expected, servers are projected to remain the largest market component, however, Canalys forecasts virtualisation and storage will grow more quickly.

The growing popularity of cloud computing has created the challenge of integrating remote cloud services into the enterprise datacentre, which now needs to start looking more like an internal or local cloud service provider, and thus adds a whole new array of challenges to the business of providing datacentre services.

The primary force behind this move is the largely unanticipated, yet extremely fast growth of unstructured data and a related demand for rich media, both of which put tremendous pressure on storage and computing resources. Secondary is the inexorable pressure placed on businesses to adjust their operating budgets, to reflect more effective economies of scale and operational efficiencies. And third is the growing availability of commodity Ethernet switching hardware, central to the seamless architecture of the next-generation datacentre.

For many organisations, reducing costs is a determining factor of a business decision; and with the private and public cloud presenting the opportunity for businesses to move away from a closed CAPEX payment model to using a pay-as-you-use OPEX model, cloud based services are now the obvious choice over competing offerings. The greatest benefit of this model is that computing resources can be deployed in a scalable fashion, accessible via a Web services interface. Customers can add and delete server resources as required, paying for them by the hour.

As a result, the datacentre is undergoing a three-stage evolution. First is the evolution of the computing substrate, which includes server virtualisation and the ability to move workload and applications via live migration of virtual machines. For the most part, the fundamental building blocks for this stage are already in place.Second is the evolution of the storage substrate, which includes globalisation and virtualisation of storage resources and the functional convergence of storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS). This stage of the evolution is under way now. Finally, in the third stage, we see the need to evolve the underlying networking substrate.

If the true benefits of this three-stage transformation are to be realised, the network substrate must evolve in lockstep with the changes that are occurring within the computing and storage domains. The changes that are required in the network domain constitute the theme of this article.

A well-run datacentre is a major consumer of space, power and cooling systems; the major cost elements in the equation that must be minimised. The demands placed on the typical datacentre are growing rapidly, making it difficult to reduce the cost of the centre without affecting some element of service quality. The challenge now is that enterprise datacentres must find ways to increase their operational efficiency, storage capacity and processing speed, all at lower costs. Ideally, this is the role of the next-generation datacentre.

So what is a next-generation datacentre? Simply put, it is a datacentre that satisfies all of these demands and also provides for growth and expansion that guarantees its own long-term relevance.

One of the key forces driving the evolution of the next-generation datacentre is the almost incalculable growth of unstructured data and demand for rich audio and video content. One only has to look at the growth in popularity of user-generated content (YouTube®, Flickr) and social networking (Facebook®, Twitter™) sites to see this.

Another major driver is the growing demand for real-time availability of business analytics. There are a growing number of companies who rely on real-time analytics to maintain a deep and ongoing understanding of the relationship between the products and services they provide, as well as the customers who buy them.

One of the reasons that datacentres are undergoing a form of centralisation, as opposed to distribution, is because they must meet regulatory requirements for data transport and management, including the rigid needs of Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA compliance. Regulatory compliance is achieved by centralising certain storage and server resources with connectivity that makes their availability seamless, and by enforcing rule-based access control to these resources.

The datacentre is fast becoming a strategic competitive asset for most industries, and, with the cloud era well upon us, the network that powers the datacentre is emerging as a key competitive differentiator. Whether it is Google or Amazon competing for the huge cloud services opportunity, or a financial institution competing to grab a stock transaction, the datacentre network already plays an enormous role in deciding the big winners. These competitive forces are driving the need for a high-performance, powerful and cost-efficient network that facilitates resource consolidation, server and storage virtualisation, and simplified and scalable management of all datacentre resources.

Given these powerful forces in action; an ever-increasing demand for data, quickly evolving technologies, concerns about finding more environmentally responsible, and economically attractive solutions, the next-generation datacentre has become a very attractive option for industry leaders looking to achieve maximum efficiency on minimal budgets.

1.Canalys EMEA data center IT infrastructure forecast: Lifted by the cloud: EMEA data center IT infrastructure market to grow to $40 billion by 2015. Palo Alto, Singapore and Reading (UK) – 12 July 2011

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