Bandwidth and mobility growth leading to a hybrid datacentre age: APC

The bandwidth and mobility explosion is not going to only shape the IT landscape, but also the power demands behind.

APC Pacific sales director, Andrew Kirker, recently spoke about the trends affecting the global IT market, as well as the vendor’s growing role within it.

One of the four key trends that Kirker identified was the Cloud, with a growing shift towards virtualisation, as well as an environment that is shared and on-demand.

“Availability moves up the stack, and there is increased compute density with virtualisation,” he said.

The increased usage of social network is fueling an “unpredictable demand,” which Kirker sees causing a generational change as it becoming core to all communications.

Mobility was another factor, with broad access and variable demand on the rise as sub US$100 smartphone open up access everywhere.

Then there is big data and harnessing the information that is collected from everything.

“IT and facilities usage forecast become possible with big data, allowing for better capacity planning,” Kirker said.

“Smart big data permits smart equipment to predict load and vary capacity.”

However, are these four mega forces having a plus a minus impact on the energy equation?

On the energy usage scale, Kirker said mobile and social are pegged at forces driving for further demand, while big data and the Cloud are facilitating for reduced demand.

“These trends have not gone unnoticed by the Australian Government, as you can find NABERS energy ratings on most office buildings nowadays,” he said,

Hybrid heaven

While Kirker admits that it is a changing market, he still foresees plenty of growth and opportunity in it.

“Devices are getting thinner, datacentres are getting bigger, and networks are becoming faster and more critical,” he said.

While people have heard of hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and the hybrid Cloud, Kirker said that Hybrid datacentre usage has also arrived.

“You use some of yours and some of theirs, as well as some on premise and some off,” he said.

Since the market is changing, Kirker said it is more of a case of the “breed and location of opportunity” that is changing and moving.

The question now comes down to whether one accesses the datacentre or the Cloud access node.

“Devices don’t directly access datacentres and need access nodes,” he said.

“There are lots of these now and in the new hybrid datacentre world.”

Datacentre community

The major focus for the vendor now is its ISX for Small IT Spaces solution, also known as InfraStruxure for Small Datacentres.

Kirker said the appeal of the solution is its simple setup and that it is fast to deploy.

“It is cost effective, provides an expanded range and has better tools,” he said.

When it comes to building and supporting large datacentres, Kirker has seen partners come together as a community.

“In the corporate on premise datacentre, one supplier and one order was common place,” Kirker said.

“Now the large datacentre is a melting pot of skills, packages and partnerships, with many channels working together.”

If a customer decides to move into a large third party datacentre, that is still an opportunity for the vendor.

“The human centric IT age is here and it’s having an impact on the datacentre and the energy dilemma,” he said.

“The datacentre market now provides a menu of offers, and customers are picking a variety of these to build their datacentre strategy.”