The IT industry does an excellent job in advance positioning the next great innovation. We have been just a step away from the internet of things (IoT) for over 20-years, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been around for as long as I can remember, and solid-state memory is set to take over from disk drives and tape, speeding access, saving space, energy and resources. Maturity of technology can be mapped using a ‘hype cycle’ concept model, in simple terms… as time moves forward the ‘hype’ becomes reality and ‘quantum leaps’ are ever closer.
Explosive data growth and need for ubiquitous storage and processing is undisputed, which leaves the question – is it time to believe the hype?
Preparing for tomorrow’s future is crucial for business survival
In data center network communications, multiple technologies are converging to deliver growth of emerging, data intensive applications from e-health and media and content delivery, to sensor connected devices and automotive vehicles.
With volumes of data set to grow exponentially, the method of gathering, storing, processing and transmitting across the data center will be seriously hindered without infrastructure that meets latency and bandwidth performance requirements now, and for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, when technologies such as AI and Machine Learning (ML) become mainstream, individual data sets will run to 100s of terabytes. Meanwhile M2M data is expected to outstrip enterprise and personal data within the next five years. This increase in data traffic is already creating bottlenecks within legacy data centers, with every gateway and connection reducing the overall performance potential of the system.
My latest research white paper, ‘Light into Money – The Future of Fibre Optics in the Data Centre Networks’ investigates the drivers for the current and next generation infrastructure needed to support the data center industry and facilitate the high bandwidth, low latency platforms required in the multi-petabyte traffic era.
With an understanding of the opportunities available and the technologies influencing change we can plan better and prepare our structures to operate at the most appropriate levels. We can learn from the hyperscale designers who are designing systems with equipment manufacturers to optimize requirements for use, to attract these fast-growing applications into the cloud.
Each of these technology advances reflects the rapid growth of the global digital economy which is creating demand for greater network speed and performance from the internet backbone right into the core of the data center.
Key challenges for the infrastructure network are the ever-growing demand for faster speed – 10GE, 25GE, 40GE, 50GE and 100GE today, with 200GE - 400GE with predicted rollout as early as 2019. Together with new network architectures designed to maximise performance, the physical infrastructure must be designed to enable rapid and seamless deployment of new switching technologies.
Data bottlenecks will continue to be a growing problem if infrastructure and data center businesses focus on short term fixes. Network infrastructure is as vital as data center power and cooling, without appropriate investment it could significantly reduce both the life cycle and ROI.
My white paper – Light into Money – The Future of Fibre Optics in the Data Centre Networks is free to download @ Light into Money – The Future of Fibre Optics in the Data Centre Networks’
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