By Xavier Surentherathas, Regional Sales Director, Park Place Technologies

With demand for data centre management software and applications, IT storage, servers, and networking equipment increasing, the global data centre infrastructure market is facing tremendous growth.

Malaysia’s data centre market is expected to reach revenues of over US$800 million by 2025[1]. This revenue projection is supported by the fact that only 80% of Malaysians have access to the Internet and local data traffic is expected to grow to 5-10% year-on-year until 2025. Coupled with the government’s plans to improve inland connectivity across Malaysia, with projects such as the National Fiberisation and Connectivity Plan (NFCP)[2], the data centre industry will grow significantly.

Data volumes are no longer expanding – they are exploding. Globally,  IT professionals are gearing up for the 175 zettabytes they are about to receive from the global datasphere by 2025. As data lakes flow into enterprise data oceans, how will data centres store, manage, and move data to ensure they are able to accommodate and manage the new demands surrounding data centre infrastructure?

A futureproof data centre will enhance efficiency, productivity and security for businesses. There are four vital aspects that will define the data centre of the future:

#1 Reliability

The foundation for any data centre is reliability. Today’s customers have little patience for outages that makes five-nines and better uptime a prerequisite for marketplace competitiveness.

However, the sphere of maintenance activity is expanding, as enterprises combine SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions with public AI services, cloud-based elasticity, and private clouds hosted on-premises and in colocation facilities. Enterprises have turned to customised hybrid infrastructure tailored to specific needs and workloads, so true reliability will depend not only on quality support, but also performance optimisation up and down the IT stack.

At Park Place Technologies, we live on the mantra of maximising uptime for our customers by keeping their mission-critical data centre hardware supported 24/7.  We are highly responsive and ready to react with our highly-skilled engineers and remote monitoring tools to ensure that your data centre hardware is running as it should, leaving you to concentrate on running your business.

#2 Decentralisation

Edge computing solutions are promising to ease network burdens by moving compute and storage toward the point of data creation.

In response, we can expect data centre corridors to develop to help provide upgraded connectivity and drive  business performance improvements.  The components will range from micro-facilities at the edge, to local and regional data centres in second- and third-tier population centres, to the more familiar data centres sited alongside corporate headquarters and large, centralised processing facilities.

#3 Powerful

Today, there are seven billion Internet-connected devices globally – and this number will continue to grow in the coming years[3]. With the evident rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and the accelerated adoption of Industry 4.0, data analytics will play a pivotal role in enhancing  IT efficiency, productivity, security, and cost-effectiveness of IT operations.

Rapid advancement in big data analytics, complex modelling, and artificial intelligence are driving a massive rise in high-density computing. The analytics process, including the deployment and usage of these tools is seen by organisations as a method to improve operational efficiency through strategic potential, drive new revenue streams and gain competitive advantages over business rivals. Data centre providers and enterprises are working to meet the energy, networking, and heat dispersal requirements of increasingly powerful supercomputing.

These advancements require new support methods for data centres. Fortunately, they’re here, as machine learning technologies are being applied to enterprise IT hardware maintenance. With ParkView Hardware Monitoring™, we can proactively monitor data centre storage, server and networking hardware 24/7. Baselines specific to the data centre is developed – resulting in alerts being sent only for actionable events. With proactive fault protection, faster fix time and of course, faster response and resolution time, data centres can now operate even more efficiently.

#4 Automated

Humans and machines have different needs, and data centre designers want to turn these facilities over to the computers. The challenges of maintaining IT infrastructure during a global pandemic will only increase the urgency behind the self-healing data centre movement. Digital infrastructures of today – physical and virtual – require a new approach to maintenance and support.

Fortunately, the building blocks are coming together. Advanced monitoring systems are reducing field technician check-ins and automating root cause analysis. Remote diagnostics and repair capabilities are on the rise. And early-stage robotics solutions are promising to take on physical data centre changes, such as server swaps, once reserved for human hands.

At Park Place Technologies, we offer Discover, Monitor, Support and Optimize (DMSO), an across-the-board infrastructure discovery, monitoring, support, and optimisation service uniquely positioned for our customers. It is a fully integrated approach to managing critical infrastructure that can help businesses manage data centre remotely, optimise network performance with analytics, and simplify the management of complex hybrid environments while realising cost-saving.

With DMSO, organisations now have access to a comprehensive set of automated tools designed to ensure that organisations have total visibility and control of all IT assets in their infrastructure, as well as benefiting from automated  hardware support and network and capacity optimisation. DMSO is a strategic, agile and cost-efficient, one-stop service model that delivers a simplified view to transform the data centre infrastructures of tomorrow.

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