Market of DPCs: forecasts for 2013

New horizons of DPCs

The traditional tasks concerning increase in efficiency of a power supply and cooling will save the importance and in 2013, but the greatest attention will be paid to the technologies providing increase in productivity of DPCs.

New technologies - server, a flash storage and administrations - will affirm more and more as DPCs as administrators battle against new threats and noises to usual work, such as BYOD, need of the increasing bandwidth and cloud.

Influence of a konsyyumerization and BYOD

DPCs will face that the organizations will begin to increase the resources to cope with a general trend of use of personal mobile devices for work.

BYOD is a reality. Gartner reported results of the recent research in December: 70% of respondents already entered or are going to enter the policy of BYOD within the next year, and one third of the polled organizations already have the operating policy of BYOD for smartphones and tablets.

As the result, DPCs in 2013 will implement politicians and security technologies to protect corporate data and infrastructure, having provided at the same time registered access of the users having own mobile devices. Also, they will implement the technologies providing the minimum volume of storage of corporate data on mobile devices, reliable protection and backup.

Performance improvement

IT infrastructure of DPCs increases efficiency due to new technologies of servers and DWH which will allow DPCs to provide new services with the smaller cost and higher performance.

Among these technologies there is data storage based on a flash memory, including SSD drives and a flash device of caching, or the PCIe-card which, when using the corresponding applications ("seeing" a flash memory), can provide significant increase in performance of storage at rather low cost. It is also technology of the single-crystal systems (SoC) which offer Intel, AMD and licensors of ARM; she allows to create servers with a power consumption several times below traditional.

These technologies were entered for 2012 and earlier, but in 2013 their implementation in DPCs will accrue.

Increase in requirements to bandwidth

Growth of number of DPCs together with the growing demand for services of the new and existing centers will push their owners to considerable investments into bandwidth.

According to a research of Emulex company, 54% of IT administrators expect that by 2016 in their DPCs networks 100-Gbit/s Ethernet will be implemented, and 81% called the growing demand for the bandwidth of one of the major tasks.

The need for the increasing bandwidth will increase in 2013 and further together with the growing demand for a broad spectrum of the cloud services covering Big Data, backup, disaster recovery, stream transfer, etc.

Consolidation

Consolidation of corporate DPCs can create great opportunities for sales for the channel thanks to several factors. It is purchases and merges which often lead to duplication of information systems and DPCs and also use of technologies of virtualization, deduplication, "thin" providing resources, cloud and other methods to reduce the number of the required equipment. While there is this consolidation, many of the parties participating in it will consider it as an opportunity to use the services offered by DPCs with multiple lease.

New DPCs

The boom of demand for services of management of IT and leases of infrastructure (co-location) from the organizations will push construction of new independent DPCs with multiple lease. Most of them will be large that will give economy from scale.

It means opportunities to participate not only in design and creation of DPCs, but also on sale more full range of services, helping customers to transfer a part for solution providers (if not all the calculations) in such third-party DPCs.

New design approaches

Many of key components of DPCs, recently provided or being in development process by large service providers, such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, will get almost into each new project of especially independent DPCs for multiple lease.

Such elements of equipment include ambient cooling which is used (for expense reduction) instead of conditioning with an intake of fresh air, new methods of the organization of flows of a hot and cold air without use of expensive raised floors, and replacement of the majority, if not all, branded servers and DWH the inexpensive equipment of custom assembly which part will not be put even into the chassis.

This last component, not proprietary equipment, can attract interest of the solution providers aiming to offer inexpensive alternatives of the equipment to the customers expanding the corporate DPCs also.

Modular DPCs

Modular DPCs will be widely adopted more in projects of construction of the new centers and expansions of existing.

Modular DPCs in which the IT equipment, and is frequent also elements of infrastructure of a power supply and cooling (or all it) are placed in the special steel container reminding cargo can be configured by vendor and then to be delivered to the right place, whether it be the existing DPC of normal type, the big empty premises, to a roof of the building or to the area affected by natural disaster.

Implementing such modular DPCs, their owners can use local conditions of ambient cooling, set them in areas with the lowest rates for the electric power or in close proximity to the customer, and all this without the need for works on integration on site.

Service providers of DPCs

In 2013 solution providers with experience of service offering and knowledge of the equipment will build new DPCs or to expand already existing to take service offering under control.

Ready-made solutions of service providers of management of IT (MSP) will give the chance almost to everyone, having the proper equipment, to provide services of own DPCs with small costs and to compete successfully with large players (Amazon, Google, etc.).

But there is also the risk: large service providers of DPCs which can order servers and DWH the whole containers have clear price advantage. However solution providers can offer full service packages in strict accordance with requirements of the customer and will not necessarily be the loser.

The most advanced approaches: DCIM and SDDC

The software - the main key to increase in efficiency of DPCs, and in 2013 will sound even more often the term DCIM (data center infrastructure management - infrastructure management of DPCs).

DCIM provides control of all equipment of DPCs, cooling and a power supply comprehensive and simple (in required degree) image. It is the important clause as "full-size" implementation of DCIM - very complex business, excluding unless the most experienced solution providers. But the "facilitated" software of DCIM which is already entering the market gives to solution providers odds in creation of management practice by DPC at once.

One more new word - SDDC, or programmable infrastructure of DPC (software-defined data center). Virtualization of server resources and storage became quite mature area, and in process of virtualization of network resources through OpenStack and other projects in addition to open-source the center of attention is displaced to virtualization of all resources of DPC to increase flexibility. Alas, original implementation of this technology is still very far.

Cloud era of DPCs

Most independent DPCs with multiple lease (if not all) provide these or those cloud services. But in 2013 we will see how DPCs will become much more active "users" of cloud services.

Customers expect that their partner DPCs will use a cloud for disaster recovery, ensuring uninterrupted operation of business, etc. DPCs will also cooperate among themselves and with competitors, using a cloud to expand interaction, for backup and even for abnormal switching.

Source: Joseph F. Covar, CRN/USA