Enterprise IT strategists are adapting to new demands from the industrial edge, 5G networks, and hybrid deployment models that will lead to more diverse data centers across more business settings.
That’s the message from a broad new survey of 150 senior IT executives and data center managers on the future of the data center. IT leaders and engineers say they must transform their data centers to leverage the explosive growth of data coming from nearly every direction.
Yet, according to the Forbes-conducted
survey, only a small percentage of businesses are ready for the decentralized
and often small data centers that are needed to process and analyze data close
to its source.
The next BriefingsDirect discussion on the latest data center strategies unpacks how more self-healing and automation will be increasingly required to manage such dispersed IT infrastructure and support increasingly hybrid deployment scenarios.
The next BriefingsDirect discussion on the latest data center strategies unpacks how more self-healing and automation will be increasingly required to manage such dispersed IT infrastructure and support increasingly hybrid deployment scenarios.
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Joining us to help learn more
about how modern data centers will efficiently extend to the computing edge is Martin Olsen, Vice
President of Global Edge and Integrated Solutions at VertivTM. The interview is conducted by Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
You should, therefore, think
differently about redesigning and deploying the physical infrastructure. How do
you operate and manage it? The concept of a data center has to transform and
evolve. It’s no longer just a big building. It could be 100, 1,000, or 10,000
smaller micro data
centers. These small data centers are going to be located in places we had
previously never imagined you would put in IT infrastructure.
So we don’t want to adopt the “right” technologies now. And that becomes a real concern for your ability to compete over time because you can outdate yourself really, really quickly if you don’t make the right choices.
That’s not to say that they have all of the answers. That’s their prediction and their responses to what’s going to be needed to solve their needs. So, 29 percent of engineers say they don’t know what percentage of the data centers will be self-configuring and self-healing, but there is an overwhelming agreement that it is a capability they need to be thinking about. Vertiv will develop and engineer our offerings going forward based on what’s going to be put in place out there.
These solutions also need to
communicate with the hypervisor platforms -- whether that’s via traditional virtualization
or containerization.
Fundamentally, you need to be able to decide how and when to move your
applications and workloads to the optimal points on the network.
So 5G plays into that, but it also means being able to process and analyze some of the data locally. There need to be aggregation points throughout the network. You will need compute to reside at multiple levels of the infrastructure. Places like the base of a cell tower could become a focal point for this.
So, the amount of
infrastructure that’s going to go out there will certainly increase. We don’t
think it’s necessarily going to be linear in terms of the cost when you pay
close attention to how, as an organization, you deploy edge computing. By
considering these new technologies, that’s going to help drive energy
efficiency, for example.
We take all of that learning and experience and drive it into what becomes the smallest common denominator data center, which could just be a rack. So it’s about working with someone who has that experience, already has the data, and has the offerings of configurable, modular solutions that are intelligent and provide accessibility to access, assess, and optimize remotely. And it’s about managing the data that comes off these systems and extracts the value out of it, the way we do that with some of our offering around Vertiv LIFE Services, with very prescriptive, actionable alarms and alerts that we send from our systems.
There is a resiliency aspect to it as well. In harsh environments such as high-tech manufacturing, you need to ensure the infrastructure is scalable and minimizes capital expenditure spending. The modular approach allows building for a future that may be somewhat unknown at this point. Deploying modular systems that you can easily augment and add capacity or redundancy to over time -- and that operate via robust remote management platforms -- are some of the things you want to be thinking about.
Olsen: We
want to make this available to everybody to review. In the interest of sharing
the knowledge about this new frontier, the new world of edge computing, we will
absolutely be making this research and study available. I want to encourage
people to go visit vertiv.com to find more
information and download the research results.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner:
Martin, what’s driving this movement away from mostly centralized IT
infrastructure to a much more diverse topology and architecture?
Olsen: It’s an
interesting question. The way I look at it is it’s about the cloud coming to
you. It certainly seems that we are moving away from centralized IT or
centralized locations where we process data. It’s now more about the cloud moving
beyond that model.
We are on the front steps of a
profound re-architecting of the Internet. Interestingly, there’s no finish line
or prescribed recipe at this point. But we need to look at processing data very,
very differently.
Over the past
decade or more, IT has become an integral part of our businesses. And it’s more
than just back-end applications like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise
resource planning (ERP), and material
requirements planning (MRP) systems
that service the organization. It’s also become an integrated fabric to how we
conduct our businesses.
Meeting at the edge
Gardner: Martin,
Cisco predicts
there will be 28.5 billion connected devices by 2022, and KPMG says
5G networks will carry 10,000 times more traffic than current 4G networks. We’re
looking at an “unknown unknown” here when it comes to what to expect from the
edge.
Olsen: Yes,
that’s right, and the starting point is well beyond just content distribution
networks (CDNs), it’s also about home automation, so accessing your home
security cameras, adjusting the temperature, and other things around home
automation.
That’s now moving to business
automation, where we use compute and generate data to develop, design,
manufacture, deploy, and operate our offerings to customers in a much better and
differentiated fashion.
We’re also trying to improve
the customer experience and how we interact with consumers. So billions of
devices generating an unimaginable amount of data out there, is what has become
known as edge computing,
which means more computing done at or near the source of data.
In the past, we pushed that data
out for consuming, but now it’s much more about data meets people, it’s data interacting
with people in a distributed IT environment. And then, going beyond that is 5G.
We
see a paradigm shift in the way we use IT. Take the amount of tech that
goes into manufacturing. It's exploding, with tens of thousands of
sensors deployed in just one facility to help dramatically improve
productivity and drive efficiency into the business.
We see a paradigm shift in the
way we use IT. Take, for example, the amount of tech that goes into a
manufacturing facility, especially high-tech manufacturing. It’s exploding,
with tens of thousands of sensors deployed in just one facility to help
dramatically improve productivity, differentiate, and drive efficiency into the
business.
Retail operations, from a compute
standpoint, now require location services to offer a personalized experience in
both the pre-shop phase as well as when you go into the store, and potentially
in the post-shop, or follow-up experience.
We need to deliver these
services quickly, and that requires lower latency and higher levels of
bandwidth. It’s increasingly about pushing out from a central standpoint to a distributed
fashion. We need to be rethinking how we deploy
data centers. We need to think about the future and where these data
centers are going to go. Where are we going to be processing all of this data?
Where does the data go?
Gardner: The
complexity over the past 10 years about factoring cloud, hybrid cloud, private
cloud, and multi-cloud is now expanding back down into the organization -- whether
it’s an environment for retail, home and consumer, and undoubtedly industrial and
business-to-business. How are IT leaders and engineers going to update their
data centers to exploit 5G and edge computing opportunities despite this
complexity?
Olsen: You
have to think about it differently around your physical infrastructure. You have
the data aspect of where data moves and how you process it. That’s going to sit
on physical infrastructure somewhere, and it’s going to need to be managed somehow.
And so, the reliance on onsite
technical and operational expertise has to evolve, too. You won’t necessarily
have that technical support, a data center engineer walking the halls of a massive
data center all day, for example. You are going to be in places like some
backroom of a retail store, a manufacturing facility, or the base of a cell
tower. It could be highly inaccessible.
You’ll need solutions that
offer predictive operations, that have self-healing capabilities within them
where they can fail in place but still operate as a function of built-in redundancy.
You want to deploy solutions that have zero-touch
provisioning, so you don’t have to go to every site to set it up and configure
it. It needs to be done remotely and with automation built-in.
You should also consider where
the applications are going to be hosted, and that’s not clear now. How much
bandwidth is needed? It’s not clear. The demand is not clear at this point. As
I said in the beginning, there is no finish line. There’s nothing that we can
draw up and say, “This is what it’s going to be.” There is a version of it out
there that’s currently focused around home automation and content distribution,
and that’s just now moving to business automation, but again, not in any prescribed
way yet.
You
should consider where the applications are going to be hosted, and
that's not clear. How much bandwidth is needed? It's not clear. There's
nothing that we can draw up and say, "This is what it's going to be."
So we don’t want to adopt the “right” technologies now. And that becomes a real concern for your ability to compete over time because you can outdate yourself really, really quickly if you don’t make the right choices.
Gardner: When
you face such change in your architecture and potential decentralization of
micro data centers, you still need to focus on security, backup and recovery, and
contingency plans for emergencies. We still need to be mission-critical, even
though we are distributed. And, as you point out, many of these systems are
going to be self-healing and self-configuring, which requires a different set
of skills.
We have a people, process, and
technology sea change coming. You at Vertiv wanted to find out what people in the
field are thinking and how they are reacting to such change. Tell us about the
Vertiv-Forbes survey, what you wanted to accomplish, and the top-line
findings.
Survey says seek strategic change
Olsen: We
wanted to gauge the thinking and gain a sense of what the C-suite, the data
center engineers, and the data center community were thinking as we face this
new world of edge computing, 5G, and Internet of things (IoT). The top findings
show a need for fundamental strategic change. We face a new mixture of
architectures that is far more decentralized and with much more modularity, and
that will mean a new way to manage and operate these data centers, too.
Based on the survey, 11
percent of C-suite executives don’t believe they are currently updated even to be
ahead of current needs. They certainly don’t have the infrastructure ready for
what’s needed in the future. It’s much less so with the data center engineers
we polled, with only 1 percent of them believing they are ready. That means the
vast majority, 99 percent, don’t believe they have the right infrastructure.
There is also broad agreement
that security and bandwidth need to be updated. Concern about security is a big
thing. We know from experience that security concerns have stunted remote
monitoring adoption. But the sheer quantity of disparate sites required for
edge computing makes it a necessity to access, assess, and potentially reconfigure
and remotely fix problems through remote monitoring and access.
Vertiv is driving a high level
of configurability of instruments so you can take our components and products
and put them together in a multitude of different ways to provide the utmost
flexibility when you deploy. We are driving modularized solutions in terms of both
modular data center and modularity in terms of how it all goes together onsite.
And we are adding much more intelligence into our offerings for the remote
sites, as well as the connectivity to be able to access, assess, and optimize these
systems remotely.
Gardner: Martin,
did the survey indicate whether the IT leaders in the field are anticipating or
demanding such self-configuration technologies?
Olsen: Some
24 percent of the executives reported that they expect more than 50 percent of data
centers will be self-configuring or have zero-touch provisioning by 2025. And about
one-third of them say that more than 50 percent of their data centers will be
self-healing by then, too.
That’s not to say that they have all of the answers. That’s their prediction and their responses to what’s going to be needed to solve their needs. So, 29 percent of engineers say they don’t know what percentage of the data centers will be self-configuring and self-healing, but there is an overwhelming agreement that it is a capability they need to be thinking about. Vertiv will develop and engineer our offerings going forward based on what’s going to be put in place out there.
Gardner: So
there may be more potential points of failure, but there is going to be a whole
new set of technologies designed to ameliorate problems, automate, and allow
the remote capability to fix things as needed. Tell us about the proper balance
between automation and remote servicing. How might they work together?
Make intelligent choices before you act
Olsen: First
of all, it’s not just a physical infrastructure problem. It has everything to
do with the data and workloads as well. They go hand-in-hand; it certainly requires
a partnership, a team of people and organizations that come together and help.
Driving
intelligence into our products and taking that data off of our systems as
they operate provides actionable data. You can then offer that analysis up to
non-technical people on how to rectify situations and to make changes.
We are trying to alleviate
that challenge by making our offerings more intelligent and offering up
actionable alarms, warnings, and recommendations to weigh choices across an
overall platform. Again, it takes a partnership with the other vendors and
services companies. It’s not just from a physical infrastructure standpoint.
Gardner: And
when that ecosystem comes together, you can provide a constellation of data
centers working in harmony to deliver services from the edge to the consumer and
back to the data centers. And when you can do that around and around, like a
circuit, great things can happen.
So let’s ground this, if we
can, to the business reality. We are going to enable entirely new business
models, with entirely new capabilities. Are there examples of how this might
work across different verticals? Can you illustrate -- when you have
constructed decentralized data centers properly -- the business payoffs?
Improving remote results
Olsen: As
you point out, it’s all about the business outcomes we can deliver in the field.
Take healthcare. There is a shortage of healthcare expertise in rural areas. Being
able to offer specialized doctors and advanced healthcare in places that you
wouldn’t imagine today requires a new level of compute and network that delivers
low latency all the way to the endpoints.
Imagine a truck fitted with a
medical imaging suite. That’s going to have to operate somewhat autonomously.
The 5G connectivity becomes essential as you process those images. They have to
be graphically loaded into a central repository to be accessed by specialists
around the world who read the images.
That requires two-way
connectivity. A huge amount of data from these images needs to move to provide that
higher level of healthcare and a better patient experience in places where we
couldn’t do it before.
There
will need to be aggregation points throughout the network. You will
need compute to reside at multiple levels of the infrastructure. Places
like the base of a cell tower could become the focal point.
So 5G plays into that, but it also means being able to process and analyze some of the data locally. There need to be aggregation points throughout the network. You will need compute to reside at multiple levels of the infrastructure. Places like the base of a cell tower could become a focal point for this.
You can imagine having four,
five, six times as much compute power sitting in these places along a remote
highway that is not easily accessible. So, having technical staff be able to
troubleshoot those becomes vital.
There are also uses cases that
will use augmented
reality (AR). Think of technicians in the field being able to use AR when they
dispatch a field engineer to troubleshoot a system somewhere. We can make them
as effective as possible, and access expertise from around the world to help troubleshoot
these sites. AR becomes a massive part of this because you can overlay what the
onsite people are seeing in through 3D glasses or virtual reality glasses and
help them through troubleshooting, fixing, and optimizing whatever system they
might be working on.
Again, that requires compute
right at the endpoint device. It requires aggregation points and connectivity all
the way back to the cloud. So, it requires a complex network working together.
The more advanced these use cases become -- the more remote locations we have
to think through -- we are going to have to deploy infrastructure and access it
as well.
Gardner:
Martin, when I listen to you describe these different types of data centers
with increased complexity and capabilities in the networks, it sounds expensive.
But are there efficiencies you gain when you have a comprehensive design across
all of the parts of the ecosystem? Are there mitigating factors that help with
the total cost?
Olsen: Yes,
as the net footprint of compute increases, I don’t think the cost is linear
with that. We have proven that with the Vertiv technologies we have developed and
already deployed. As the compute footprint increases, there is a fundamental
need for driving energy efficiency into the infrastructure. That comes in the
form of using more efficient ways of cooling the IT infrastructure, and we have
several options around that.
It’s also from new
battery technologies. You start thinking about lithium-ion
batteries, which Vertiv has solutions
around. Lithium-ion batteries make the solution far more resilient, more
compact, and it needs much less maintenance when it sits out there.
Gardner: Were
there any insights from the Forbes survey that went to the cost equation? How do
the IT executives expect this to shake out?
Energy efficiency partnerships
Olsen: We
found that 71 percent of the C-suite executives said that future data centers
will reduce costs. That speaks to both the fact that there will be more
infrastructure out there, but that it will be more energy efficient in how it’s
run.
It’s also going to reduce the
cost of the overall business. Going back to the original discussion around the
business outcomes, deploying infrastructure in all these different places will help
drive down the overall cost of doing business.
It’s an energy efficiency play
both from a very fundamental standpoint in the way you simply power and cool
the equipment, and overall, as a business, in the way you deliver improved customer
experience and how you deliver products and services for your customers.
Gardner: How
do organizations prepare themselves to get out in front of this? As we
indicated from the survey findings, not that many say they are prepared. What
should they be doing now to change that?
Olsen: Yes,
most organizations are unprepared for the future -- and not necessarily even in
agreement on the challenges. A very small percentage of the respondents, 11
percent of executives believe that their data centers are ahead of current
needs, even less so for the data center engineers. Only 44 percent of them say
that their data centers are updated regularly. Only 29 percent say their data
centers even meet current needs.
To prepare going forward, they
should seek partnerships. Get the data centers upgraded, but also think through
and understand how organizations like Vertiv have decades of experience in
designing, deploying, and operating large data centers from a physical
infrastructure standpoint. We use that experience and knowledge base for the
data center of tomorrow. It can be a single IT rack or two going to any location.
We
take all of our learning and experience and drive it into what becomes
the smallest common denominator data center, which could just be a rack.
These are modular solutions that are intelligent and can be optimized
remotely.
We take all of that learning and experience and drive it into what becomes the smallest common denominator data center, which could just be a rack. So it’s about working with someone who has that experience, already has the data, and has the offerings of configurable, modular solutions that are intelligent and provide accessibility to access, assess, and optimize remotely. And it’s about managing the data that comes off these systems and extracts the value out of it, the way we do that with some of our offering around Vertiv LIFE Services, with very prescriptive, actionable alarms and alerts that we send from our systems.
Very few organizations can do
this on their own. It’s about the ecosystem, working with companies like Vertiv,
working closely with our strategic partners on the IT side, storage networks, and
all the way through to the applications that make it all work in unison.
Think through how to efficiently
add compute capacity across all of these new locations, what those new
locations should look like, and what the requirements are from a security
standpoint.
There is a resiliency aspect to it as well. In harsh environments such as high-tech manufacturing, you need to ensure the infrastructure is scalable and minimizes capital expenditure spending. The modular approach allows building for a future that may be somewhat unknown at this point. Deploying modular systems that you can easily augment and add capacity or redundancy to over time -- and that operate via robust remote management platforms -- are some of the things you want to be thinking about.
Gardner: This
is one of the very few empirical edge computing research assets that I have
come across, the Vertiv
and Forbes collaboration survey. Where can people find out more information
about it if they want more details? How is this going to be available?
Listen
to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Vertiv.
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