This week, London hosts its first major data centre summit, the Data Centre South Summit 2016, on February 10.
CBR lists five key points the event will address.
1. Challenging traditional connectivity models: how to find the right data centre for the right job?
When: 10am
Where: Seminar 1
Data centre connectivity is one of the most critical aspects that businesses need to look at when they choose a hub to deploy their IT services and data.
During the event, Tim Creswick, CEO of managed services provider Vorboss, and Jonathan Arnold, MD at London based colo Volta Data Centres, will take to the stage at 10am to discuss how businesses can unlock their infrastructure’s potential by using modern connectivity solutions. They will also discuss what needs to be considered when choosing the next site for deployment.
The global data centre interconnect (DCI) market is under heavy industry growth. According to analyst firm Ovum, this space has grown 16% to $2.5 billion in 2015, with the fastest growing rate (64%) coming from internet content providers (ICP).
The firm predicts the market to continue to grow at a 10.5% CAGR until 2019, when the market should be worth more than $4.2 billion.
2. Turning the Data Centre upside down
When: 10:30am
Where: Seminar 2
Looking at the cooling side of the data centre, TCL Data director Barry Shambrook will be looking at 10:30am at the efficiency and problems sparked by raised floors while tapping into the flexibility of cool air distribution.
He will answer questions such as; can a dropped ceiling provide the same or better flexibility to accommodate different IT equipment and containment? Are there advantages in efficiency, capacity or resilience? How is the cooling system configured and controlled for this new layout?
Cooling is one of the biggest expenses of a data centre, representing up to 30% of costs throughout a facility’ lifetime says Schneider Electric.
Fresh air-cooling is becoming a trend amongst most colos, with Digital Realty saying that this solution helps to lower energy consumption and overall costs of data centre operations.
3. Data Centre on the Edge
When: 11am
Where: Seminar 1
According to Digital Catapult, as of January 2016, there were 3.419 billion people connected to the internet (of 7.395 people inhabiting Earth). 2.307 billion are active social media users and 1.968 billion are active mobile social users.
Yet, the number of people connected to the internet only represents 46% of the world’s population, which reveals the large opportunity presented to both colos and data centres as more services will be needed and edge data centres will be used to cope with the demand.
Tony Day, global director for data centre projects at Schneider Electric, will be addressing the edge data centre opportunity at the Data Centre South Summit at 11am.
He will discuss how business critical applications will be impacted by net neutrality forcing business to look at new strategic ways to economically grow their on-premise digital infrastructure.
In a recent CBR analysis, we looked into Google’s own take on edge data centres revealing how the tech giant could become a super power of content delivery networks with 70 localised hubs.
4. What effect will an ever more connected world will have on the data centre environment
When: 11:30am
Where: Seminar 1
In 2010, electricity used in global data centres accounted for between 1.1% and 1.5% of total electricity use, according to researcher Jonathan Koomey. By 2013, this value had increased to 3%, according to the Uptime Institute.
Addressing the exploding needs of ICT, again fostered by the ever growing IoT ecosystem, Leeds University professor Ian Bitterlin will discuss at 11:30am how the demand for digital services has outstripped the capacity of ICT hardware, which resulted in data centres having experienced relentless growth.
He will look at the viability of such deployments in today’s connected world and how the IoT will affect power consumption in the data centre. Bitterlin will also look at what the industry can do to help minimise the impact of always-on connected power hungry things worldwide.
5. When downtime is not an option
When: 12pm
Where: Seminar 1
At 12pm, Andy Bailey, solutions architect from Stratus Technologies will be looking at how to keep essential compute services fully operational as the consumerisation era falls upon company’s IT systems and data centres.
The scope of mission-critical computing has expanded to include a proliferation of customer-facing, mobile and social-enabled applications. The sheer number of these applications has expanded customer touch-points and these services are hosted in big data centres, Bailey said.
It is crucial to keep data centres functional at 100% of the time as people, companies and manufacturers rely ever more on connected products and services.
Recent research conducted by Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute in January 2016, has found that the estimated full cost associated with an unplanned data centre outage increased from $5,617 per minute in 2010 to $7,908 in 2013, and now stands at $8,851.
The average cost of a data centre outage rose from $505,502 in 2010 to $690,204 in 2013 to $740,357 this year, according to the study.
