The director and senior boffin at Schneider Electric’s Data Center claims that micro datacentres on the edge of the network are the next big thing.
Victor Avelar said that infrastructure vendors are providing self-contained prefabricated and highly integrated pods that allow small data centres to be deployed quickly, reliably and cost effectively.
The idea can be combined to form the larger IT facilities many organisations require as their needs grow, but who cannot afford the larger up-front costs of building a new traditional, or purpose built data centre.
He cited a new white paper from Schneider Electric with the catchy title of “Cost Benefit Analysis of Edge Micro Data Centre Deployments”. He said that it proves why micro datacentres are best suited to support edge computing over other alternatives such as server rooms and traditional builds.
Small prefabricated and integrated, micro datacentres benefit from scalability, speed of deployment, reliability and fulfil the desire to outsource applications to the cloud or colocation facilities.
Key technology drivers enabling the miniaturisation of datacentres include: compaction of IT equipment—led by ever more powerful and smaller silicon chips, all IT components from processing elements and networking equipment to storage arrays are becoming smaller; hyper convergence – which allows several subsystems, including processor elements, networking technology, disks and solid-state mass storage to be integrated into a single enclosure; and virtualisation which allows a single element to run many different applications simultaneously.
If some of the 200 micro datacentres are geographically located away from the others, network latency might be affected and there may therefore be some instances when the purpose-built approach, with all the IT in the same location may be preferable, Avelar said.
