The datacentre landscape is continually shifting and evolving, meaning there is no room for complacency, according to Eaton.
The Australian market has shown a healthy demand for new datacentres, with new facilities regularly popping up on the landscape, but datacentre solutions product manager, Rob Steel, warns of remaining obstinate.
To illustrate his point, Steel expects big single instance datacentres to become “a thing of the past” due to the developments in security, disaster recovery, and data proliferation resulting from Big Data.
“The future footprint will likely be regional clusters and software connecting the datacentres together in a hybrid model,” he said.
At the same time, Steel said regional datacenteres will remain relatively large in order to compute, store and analyse vast amounts of data, adding that they will need to be “scalable and efficient”.
However, the rapid growth in the datacentre footprint in Australia has raised natural concerns about whether the market can support this type of expansion, though Steel reassures that the current momentum is viable in the short to medium term.
“Demand still outweighs supply as business and governments outsource either partially or completely their IT services and infrastructure in favour of managed services or co-location providers,” he said.
Steel attributes this continued demand to local recognition for ensuring uninterrupted business continuity and uptime.
Data pushes on
Data continues to grow at an astounding rate around the world, and the proliferation of datacentres is often connected with this trend.
To show how significant the growth rate is, the Canalys 2013 APAC forum estimated that if all of the data prior to 2013, such as books, magazines, digital content, is equivalent to the amount of data that is created in just 12 hours today.
In this current landscape, Steel expects further opportunities to come out of converged infrastructure, which he describes as the “backbone of the Cloud”.
“Everything is moving up the stack and going to pre-configured designs to ensure reliability, cost efficiency and ease of use, so systems and solutions integrators have a distinct advantage here,” he said.
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.