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How technology is redefining the data centre

Emerging technologies are redefining all areas of our lives, and the traditional data centre is no different. A plethora of advanced technologies and software innovations are already reshaping data centre architecture and business processes, with plenty more innovations to come.

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the most exciting developments that are leading the data centre revolution now and over the next few years.

By: Andrew Fray

Hybrid by design

Businesses realise they need to look to the cloud, but few feel they can rely entirely on the public cloud to secure their sensitive data. This is leading them down the path of a hybrid approach, with 53% of European enterprises currently or planning to use a hybrid cloud solution for their corporate IT according to our research with IDC.

Colocated hybrid data centres enable enterprises to place private IT infrastructure next to access points to the public cloud, enabling them to reap the benefits of an outsourced colocation solution along with private connection points to a hyperscale cloud platform.

Going software-defined

Hardware has traditionally been businesses’ biggest data centre cost so, in a bid to address this issue, what was once very much a hardware-led space is swiftly becoming software-defined – to the extent that Markets and Markets predict the software-defined industry to exceed $84 billion by 2022.

In addition to removing costly, bulky hardware, software-defined data centres offer less downtime, easier maintenance and lower electricity usage, all of which significantly reduce costs and are more environmentally friendly. The software-defined journey begins with virtualisation, environments in which physical servers support millions of digital machines.

Businesses can evolve towards a fully virtualised software-defined architecture by virtualising their networking, storage, compute and security at their own pace.

Contain your applications

As virtualisation evolves alongside the rise of cloud and software-as-a-service solutions, there has become a clear need for a more flexible approach to application and services delivery. This has led to the adoption of containers to build applications that can be delivered instantly and enable scale on demand.

Containers are generating new orchestration and management opportunities that ease the delivery of cloud services within the data centre. The technology is being adopted at mass, with 451 Research claiming revenues in the application container market will quadruple by 2021.

The emerging edge

Edge data centres will become crucial to businesses as the future of networking becomes much more distributed. The boom in IoT data being consumed by mobile devices and increased enterprise usage of highly distributed applications requires a more spread out approach. In fact, Gartner predicts that 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of the traditional centralised data centre or cloud by 2022.

Flash forward

The days of row upon row of spinning disks are well behind us, with more efficient all-flash solutions being introduced in their place. Flash costs have plummeted over the last few years alongside advances in its reliability, performance and capability, to the extent that businesses are now able to consider all-flash array. Indeed, IDC revealed that the All Flash Array market increased by 54.7% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2018.

The introduction of 3D NAND flash has added further weight to this. It is being talked up as the biggest revolution in memory technology in decades and seeing flash now surpassing the storage density of HDDs, with the latest iterations offering up to 1,000 times faster performance.

A data centre for the digital age

The data centre is already playing a critical role in helping businesses innovate and achieve growth, but it’s only going to become more influential as we see these technologies and more increase in maturity. Interxion’s data centre campus in the heart of East London, including our latest addition LON3, is the perfect home to help your business evolve alongside the growth of emerging technologies in the data centre.

For more information on how to join central London’s best-connected data centre campus, download our London factsheet.