Has cloud killed off the on premises data centre yet? Not at all: the practice of businesses operating their own physical data centres is not dying out and we may see an increase in the average number of physical servers in companies in 2019. That’s according to a new report by IHS Markit, a data and market analysts company.
In their report they found that the increased availability of software-defined storage and solid state drive adoption is allowing businesses to operate and maintain their own on premises data centres, while working in multi-cloud based architecture.
Cisco, Dell, HPE, Juniper, and Huawei were identified as the top five data centre vendors by respondents to IHS’s survey.
Alive and Flourishing
The on-premises enterprise data center (DC), in short, is “alive and flourishing”.
Clifford Grossner Senior Research Director of Cloud and Virtualisation at IHS Markit commented in the report that: “Application architectures are evolving with the increased adoption of software containers and micro-services coupled with a Dev/Ops culture of rapid and frequent software builds.”
“We see new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) incorporated into applications. These applications consume network bandwidth in a very dynamic and unpredictable manner and make new demands on servers for increased parallel computation,” Mr Grossner added.
Security a Driver
In their survey IHS Markit found that a key driver for a company to operate their own data centre was security concerns. While 71 percent of those surveyed commented that the ability to scale was a key point.
They also found that 73 percent of servers are predicted to operate virtual machine monitor (VMM) and containers in the future.
Containers are another form of visualization that allow you to run applications across different systems without the need for specialised developer codes for each system.
“New software technologies are driving more diverse compute architectures. An example is the development of multi-tenant servers (VMs and software containers), which is requiring new features in CPU silicon to support these technologies,” says Clifford Grossner of IHS Markit.
“AI and ML have given rise to a market for specialized processors capable of high degrees of parallelism (such as GPGPUs and the Tensor Processing Unit from Google). We can only expect this trend to continue and new computer architectures emerging in response, he added.
