Six major trends in the future development of data centers

In recent years, driven by the growth in demand from industries such as financial telecommunications, the upgrading of existing computer rooms, and the increased investment in the construction of government public service platforms, data centers have achieved unprecedented development. Multiple challenges. There are mainly the following aspects:

1. Energy pressure. With ever-increasing power bills, power consumption and cooling have become a major challenge for data centers;

2. Resource integration. Most of the current data center systems are complex, resulting in low operation and maintenance efficiency, and it is difficult to share various storage, computing and information resources;

3. Information security. As the core of the enterprise IT system, the data center's security is particularly important.

Six major trends in the future development of data centers

Based on the current status and challenges of data centers, the future development trends of data centers will show the following major aspects:

Trend 1: Greening

The sharp increase in the scale of data centers has brought about a substantial increase in operating costs, of which electricity costs are the most important operating cost. How to improve the power utilization efficiency (PUE, the lower the better.) has become a major issue for major data center owners. At present, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and BAT are actively introducing various green energy-saving technologies to reduce PUE. In addition to common practices such as water cooling, natural cooling, closed hot and cold channels, cancellation of UPS, and high-temperature operation, new energy technologies are gradually being introduced, and the use of software scheduling technology to reduce energy consumption will become a development trend.

Trend 2: Modular Deployment

The development of cloud computing and mobile Internet has put forward higher requirements for the deployment ready time of data centers. At present, the whole cabinet and container deployment mode can greatly shorten the construction period of data centers, but the whole has not been applied on a large scale. Therefore, the whole cabinet will be the main deployment mode in the next few years, and the container can be used as a temporary data center in special occasions such as large-scale conferences and events.

Trend 3: Automation

With the continuous expansion of the scale of a single data center, the operation and maintenance force required by the traditional model has increased significantly, and the cost has also continued to increase. In this regard, Google and other giants have long introduced software methods to automate data center operation and maintenance, improve operation and maintenance efficiency, and improve customer experience, which will also become a major trend in the future

Trend 4: Virtualization and Software Definition

Virtualization can greatly improve the resource utilization efficiency of data centers and has been widely used. Software-defined technology can provide large-scale users with fast and flexible multi-tenant heterogeneous resource configuration, isolation, and provisioning, but storage and network are the bottlenecks. This requires the introduction of software-based technology. Customers quickly provide virtualized data center services, making each customer feel like they have an independent all-in-one data center.

Trend 5: Intensive and Clustered Deployments

Large-scale applications such as the Internet, mobile Internet, and cloud services need to be deployed in multiple data centers, which brings heavy synchronization and high broadband costs to the data center. Therefore, cluster deployment and intensive deployment of data centers will become the development trend. Clustered deployment is equivalent to the integration of multiple data centers, and the construction of large second-tier networks has become a trend. SDN is useful here. Intensive deployment can save the cost of interaction between data centers, and is also conducive to reducing deployment and operation and maintenance costs.

Trend 6: Security and Trust

Security not only refers to firewalls, IPS/IDS, intrusion detection, antivirus and other security precautions, but also includes fire, hurricane and other disaster response. Therefore, a reliable disaster recovery plan should be constructed at the initial stage of data center construction, or an off-site disaster backup center should be established. This is a hot issue that needs to be paid attention to in current and future data center construction.