What Would You Wish For?

A much-loved story among kids (and young-at-heart adults), Aladdin is Disney’s latest production. After my family and I watched the movie, my young daughter immediately knew what she would request from the genie should she be lucky enough to come across a magic lamp. The kid in me wanted to take part so I thought about what my customers might ask should they be granted a similar fortune.

CLICK TO TWEET: Priyesh Sankaran provides you three ways to transform your data center "without using genie."

Genie: My master, what is your wish?

Hypothetical data center client: Please transform my data center at the snap of your fingers. Include networking components such as agility, high speeds, seamless migration to support the link speeds and applications – known and unknown – that are coming. Provide faster mean time to repair (MTTR) to minimize disruption. May the power always be available and please ensure we always avoid downtime. This means our customers will always be satisfied.

The list goes on and on.

Major data center transformations 

Data centers have undergone major digital transformations in the last few years, resulting in requirements for a more robust and secure network infrastructure. Transforming a data center has many challenges to begin with, and the hardest is often the ability to upgrade and modernize quickly without having to rip and replace current infrastructure.

Given traditional in-house data centers are evolving, here are three examples of transformation:

Pivoting around Hyperscale*

The hyperscale is essentially driving innovation with the exponential growth of bandwidth and a huge amount of data. In fact, Facebook is building the largest hyperscale data center in Singapore. Hyperscale data centers could be early adopters for 400G ethernet speeds.

From Carrier Neutrality to Cloud Neutrality*

As the enterprise moves workloads to the cloud, data centers are offering a wider access to cloud providers. As a result, more businesses are prioritizing a hybrid-cloud strategy.

The rise of Multi-Tenant Data Centers (MTDCs)

MTDCs are operated by third parties like service providers or cloud companies to support multiple enterprise tenants. The MTDC offers various benefits including the ability to provide capacity at a faster rate to meet the growing demand of faster time to market. The MTDC approach is also being adopted by some of the Hyperscale data centers as a strategy to quickly deploy more edge data centers.

Supporting a hybrid future

We are likely to see more hybrid architectures in the future. While hybrid architectures may introduce solutions to data center issues, there are challenges in managing the increased complexities. Fiber optic technologies will continue to play a critical role in enabling future data centers to support high speeds as they move from 10Gb/s and 40GB/s to 100GB/s, 400GB/s and beyond.

Although CommScope doesn’t sell magic lamps, we can do our best to prepare you for what is to come. 

*Structure Research: Global & APAC Data Centre Colo Market Trends presentation