How Hyper-scale Data Center Management Affects the Industry
Data center management is increasingly a customized, granular affair, due to additional opportunities available in tailored construction technologies and operational styles. Led by innovators such as Google, Intel, Apple and Facebook, other enterprises have started to step up their game. The enterprise data center is becoming less buttoned-down, as creative minds on both the data center operator and client sides let some of their more radical ideas flourish.
This industry development has given rise to the hyper-scale data center market – a phenomenon in which an array of forward looking data center designers, developers and operators fuel the evolution of server, network and power infrastructure. Gartner research vice president Richard Gordon, who wrote in a 2013 study that there is “no such thing as ‘typical enterprise IT spending,'” is one of the proponents of seeing where investment in new data center management strategies and architecture technologies will take the industry.
“[Hyper-scale] companies, who typically have very large infrastructure requirements and highly skilled teams with tight control over a relatively narrow set of applications, can specify their own system designs and often place little or no value in many of the features typically found in those systems positioned towards enterprise customers,” Gordon wrote.
While hyper-scale involves more direct data center management, some enterprises are finding that this increased oversight is beneficial to the bottom line. These companies are investing less in prepackaged, integrated systems. While bundled services that come with pre-integrated servers, storage and network devices are useful for getting new applications ready for deployment as fast as possible, these options can often result in more operating expenses over time. While the hyper-scale technique takes longer and requires more effort at the outset, some of the more unorthodox companies taking this approach say that they experience long-term benefits in energy efficiency, server optimization and cost-effectiveness.
Innovations in Data Center Management
One company making big changes to its server hardware is Intel, which is investing in micro servers, VentureBeat reported. Micro servers are small chips that can contribute to high density, low power server configurations in data centers. Although there have been concerns that micro servers could “cannibalize” the server chip market, Jason Waxman, Intel vice president of the cloud infrastructure group, said that the company is providing an alternative processing technology that gives data center operators more options. He also commented that innovation in server hardware is taking cues from the hyper-scale movement, the leaders of which are consistently on the lookout for technologies that will improve its data center management efforts.As companies move away from prepackaged solutions from big vendors, increased customization is becoming a higher priority for both merchants and users.
“[Timely innovation] of the things that’s challenging about the server market,” Waxman told VentureBeat. “Particularly when you look at some of the growth segments in the data center. If you look at cloud computing or high performance computing, customers are telling us that they still want to see a fast performance growth rate. They want to see repeatable improvements.”
If you are doing a data center migration, here’s a helpful article on data center migration steps.
