dcd big discussion guide

The Business of Data Centers

BIG DISCUSSIONS FOR 2016 Be at the table

not on the menu

A s the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Big Data and Cloud drive more and more data processing

requirements it is predicted that by 2020 there will 50 Zettabytes of data generated by more than 25 billion connected devices. By 2040 it has been calculated that to process the world’s data requirements using today’s infrastructure would consume all the energy in the world. So we’re going to have to innovate ourselves out of this one together.

From software-defined architectures to hyper-convergence, open-source, web scale and disaggregation, models to deal with the challenge are proliferating. On-premise data centers, hybrid and private cloud deployments are becoming more complex and as the two worlds of physical infrastructure and logical architecture collide a more holistic approach to the full data center eco-system is required. With scale comes not only more complexity but also risk.

GET INVOLVED!

To help kick-start the process of change we have published this guide of what we think will be the big discussions in 2016.

These discussions will be lived out at DatacenterDynamics conferences around the world. Keynotes from leading industry figures, panels discussions and rountables will all add fuel to the fire and we will be reporting on how the conversation develops though the magazine.

It’s never been easier to join this discussion because, if you haven’t heard already we have moved to a free-to-attend model for qualified end-users at all our events (see calendar on back cover). Your industry needs you tp particpate and to share; be at the table not on the menu.

BRUCE TAYLOR

5 SERVERS & STORAGE

7 CORE > EDGE

9 COLO + CLOUD

11 DESIGN & BUILD

13 POWER & COOLING

15 SOFTWARE DEFINED

17 OPEN SOURCE

19 SECURITY + RISK

Your guide to the BIG discussions that will happen at DCD events around the world this year

SERVERS& STORAGEThis track is focused on hardware and understanding the impact of compute, network and storage transformation on IT capacity requirements, data center design and architecture.

Bare-metal vs.full-function serversWhat’s right for business

To meet the relentless demand of the zettabyte-era drives innovative IT systems architectures that can achieve >2X performance and power-efficiency improvement. Where do you start? Where are others on this journey?

Extreme performance at the chip level (think a rack-on-chip), extreme density at the rack level, and extreme PUE at the infrastructure level, are all within sight. When does your organization begin planning for this? Who’s climbing in this thin air now?

Matching the right processor architecture and server platform for the data center, today, likely looks much more like a commodity selection – priced accordingly. What

are today’s best practices for server selection for the critical environment in which they will be installed, with an eye on what matches up best with both ‘North of the rack’ and ‘South of the rack’ infrastructure?

The speed and capacity of flash storage are now clear, so where does flash sit in your storage architecture plans? While certainly some flash vendors are holding out all-flash arrays as the right technology, many storage professionals prefer hybrid architectures which blend disk arrays with flash SSD. And then along comes rack-scale flash, which blurs the lines between memory and storage. Is this the right answer for true high-performance hyper-convergence and SDI?

5 datacenterdynamics.com | Big Discussions for 2016

6 Low-power, high-performance servers: How’s it Goin’?

4 Silicon Photonics: How soon will it be server-ready?

1 Processor and server performance may be key to determining a holistic data center ecosystem design. Do you now plan with this in mind?

5 Virtualization and containers: It’s not either-or but both- and…

What do you need to begin?

8 SSD/Flash storage. Will you ease into it with a hybrid solution? Are you ready for Flash-based S(torage)-a-a-S for backup? DR?

2 New architectures for massive storage gains in the data center. Are you

planning for what’s next?

10 Bitcoin mining is pushing the limits

for what’s possible in rack density. What can be learned for both the production data center and hyperscalers?

3 Bare-metal vs. full-function servers: What’s right for your business?

9 In the zettabyte era, data lakes will become the norm. How do you analyse how you best meet your big

data/analytics need with cloud-based data lake services?

7 Finally, 2016 may be the year ARM hyperscale servers are ready to seriously

challenge X86 in the data center. Should you be paying attention to ARM? Why?

Bare-metal vs.full-function serversWhat’s right for business

CORE> EDGEThis track is focused on the internal and external data center transit layer from core to edge and the rapidly developing data center interconnect [DCI] eco-system.

At the turn of the Century, the core backbone dominated the network conversation. Today and for the near future, it’s the network edge that’s become the belle of the digital transformation ball. Why? What are the drivers? What does this portend for your business, and how are you adapting?

Content delivery, interactivity (gaming), IoT, mobility, social media, Big data/analytics – all of these are at the network edge. Does each require different networking architectures, gear and management software? Enterprise network designers face a myriad of challenges in the zettabyte era. How do leaders in the heterogenous digital enterprise universe

stay atop the demands? Are disaggregated data center infrastructures the answer to the zettabyte/IoT era?

Hyperscale like the big boys — AWS, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay. These players — with fast growth rates, real-time access requirements and zero tolerance for failure - are constantly innovating through the traditional network architecture barriers. In the process, they’re driving up performance and beating down costs.

Today’s digital enterprise has a lot to learn from these leaders about what to expect in the near future, even if not a Web-scale player.

The edge is the belle of the digital

transormationball

1 5G wireless communications will give vastly, globally distributed smart devices access to unlimited

computing capability. How will your company use IEEE 802.11ac wireless technology that brings the leading edge of the cloud to your business?

5 Data lakes and sandboxes – lying in mega data center

storage – demand high optimization of both the network core and distribution layers to provide necessary big data analytics agility. How can you ensure the speed you need?

2 How are the telco providers now delivering advanced business

services to the enterprise?

4 When designing storage-area network SAN fabric, it’s important to consider “mesh” and

“core-edge” topologies. Learn the pros and cons of both topologies for designing SAN fabrics and which is best suited to your business needs.

3 DCI and internet exchange are now primary value drivers for digital enterprise

transformation. Is your network strategy expansive enough to take advantage of the new opportunities?

6 Learn how SDN, NFV, Cloud and Open Source are generating a perfect

storm of networking value creation: Massively improve network performance, cut costs, drive new innovation. How is your company navigating these waters?

7 As the demand for network speed and bandwidth capacity rises, network

cabling is the quite literal spinal column of data center network infrastructure.

8 As the LAN technology of choice, how is Ethernet evolving to keep up

with new network demands?

9 Dark Fiber: What you should know about inter data center connectivity.

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1 When choosing the Iaas/PaaS provider, what’s your criteria for whether they’re the

right fit for your workloads? 2 Automating hybrid and multi-cloud workload performance analytics and orchestration, how

far can you go? What’s missing?

6 The enterprise IT relationship with its MSP may be the single most

important relationship it has – how are you doing with yours?

4 It’s now an app- and workload-centric world. Has your enterprise IT recognized and

reconciled with that yet?

8 Use licenses and SLAs for the cloud. Fun, huh? Do you

know how you’re doing on performance to your agreements?

5 Can we please just make the IT services sourcing RFP go away now? Who needs it anymore? How do we get real automation

and transparency into the colo services acquisition process?

3 IaaS/PaaS fundamentally changes the roles of enterprise IT

leaders. What are they now and what should they be?

7 Colo selection as a time-to-market, agility, cost-reduction

and risk avoidance strategy. What’s most important to you beyond simply getting more capacity?

It’s now an app-and workload-centric world

COLO+ CLOUDThis track is focused on sourcing, integration and management of DCaaS, IaaS & PaaS, and telecom, understanding complex capacity issues and data center outsourcing options.

The forecasted data tsunami is bearing down. In many cases, it’s already here. How can CIOs, IT units and data center organizations best prepare to thrive — not just survive? Purpose-built colocation data centers give prospective IT capacity and services planners interesting options beyond ‘build-your-own’; competitive selection, time-to-market, agility, operational efficiency, etc… What are the downsides? How good is your enterprise at sourcing, selecting and procuring colo services? How do you select the right analytics-based trusted sourcing advisor?

Increasingly colocation providers are adopting Tier III (N+1) availability as standard as a matter

of competitive advantage. Uptime Institute’s Tier

Classification always was intended to be matched with the “business need” for availability. Likely, some

workloads will require Tier III, but are you over-subscribed, paying too much, if the bulk of the workloads you manage don’t really require that level of availability guarantee? Will availability requirements ultimately be a software-defined workload allocation and automation matter? High-Availability-as-a-Service (HAaaS), perhaps?

Debate Over: Hybrid cloud wins. Actually, a multicloud IaaS/PaaS is the winner. Deploying multiple cloud infrastructure and platforms offers the enterprise greater flexibility and choice. But multi-cloud orchestration and management is too often a point of pain for IT. Because this is the future for many if not most enterprise IT, what are the hurdles and how can management leap over the multi-cloud workload management hurdles? How will vendor neutral cloud exchanges accelerate the move towards a multi-cloud set-up?

3 IaaS/PaaS fundamentally changes the roles of enterprise IT

leaders. What are they now and what should they be?


It’s now an app-and workload-centric world

DESIGN& BUILDThis track is focused on what’s new in data center design, value engineering and construction methodologies within the emerging data center segments.

Holistic, full-stack ecosystem, ‘mud-to-cloud’, purpose-built data center design and development. Is it feasible? Effective? Possible? Desirable? At what scale? Who’s doing it? What are they learning?

If you think data centers are mundane design-build problems, we survey some of the world’s most innovative sites and developments and talk with the architects, engineers and construction pros that pull off these miracles of ‘thinking differently.’

Mega-scale data centers will continue to proliferate to provide a variety of legacy applications, colo, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The advantages will be ones of scale, cost, power and network/interconnect capacity. There are companies leading this charge. What are their unique challenges in siting and developing?


1 Designing the full “Mud-to-Cloud” ecosystem data center. Who’s doing it now?

9 As availability and resiliency become increasingly virtual, what’s a

likely future on data center development economics?

7 How bold can the design/engineer be in exploring new, leading-edge? How far can they go in advising their clients?

11 Design on a cost-per-mW basis for low maintenance, lights-out operations, and

<1.2PUE. What’s the conversation quality that design engineers have with CXOs during planning?

2 Futurist views of data center demand and growth trends.

Where do we think we will be in 2016?

10 Re-thinking data center primary and alternate power sources. Can you see proper roles for wind, solar, fuel cell, natural gas?

12 A Gartner-style “bimodal strategy” will look different from enterprise to enterprise, depending on where they are in digital transformation, but every

business should have some form of it. How formally is (or should) your organization be taking this on?

3What are the challenges of financing, siting and developing the mega-scale data center in the

new world? 4Right-sizing and specializing for the network edge data center: It’s a different animal. What will it look like

5Modular, POD and SCIF –small, quick, agile, robust. What’s the demand side?

6 Financing your new data center build. Do you know all the available options?

8We’re in the era of the zettabyte: How do designers plan for the demand of the coming decade?

Bimodal strategywill look differentin each enterprise

5 The black eye of zombie servers: What’s the progress?

What are the solutions?

7 Human error still rules as the #1 cause of downtime.

Trained, tested, certified management and staff should be corporate policy. What’s your case?

8 Legacy critical environment retrofit and

upgrade: When does it make sense?

Global warming now moves center stage

POWER& COOLINGThis track is focused on engineering, operations and facilities management and optimizing the performance, efficiency and resilience of the critical environment.

6 Analytics, predictives, modelling and simulations for power and thermal management are now in common use. Are you using

them? Are they operationally effective?


1 From 5kW to 50kW in the rack by 2020? Your densities may vary,

but they are going up. What’s your plan? 2

Achieving maximal infrastructure performance, effectiveness and efficiency, Do you now dashboard your

operations with these in mind?

3 To get to the true SDDC takes making DCIM, ITIL and ITSM. Is this on

your radar?4 Energy alternatives in the data center and campus, do you see a role for

smart microgrids?

5 The black eye of zombie servers: What’s the progress?

What are the solutions?

7 Human error still rules as the #1 cause of downtime.

Trained, tested, certified management and staff should be corporate policy. What’s your case?

Global warming now moves center stage

Global warming now moves center stage, and boards and executive teams will be on record with eco-sustainability targets and statements. Government agencies will, again, become visible on the topic of IT and data centers. With both power density and consumption growing, wha t should be your company’s best IT and data center operational management response to calls for effectiveness, efficiency, carbon reduction, and power alternatives?

For legacy data center owners, intelligently ‘sweating the assets’ can mean dropping hundreds of thousands to the bottom line by buying back capacity headroom, extending the life of the facility, and giving

management greater time to make the right but complex future IT services choices. Are you doing everything you can to monitor, measure and manage for maximal efficiency? Are you now deploying DCIM tools to help automate this?

Ok, what gives? Everyone knows as a matter of physics that liquid-based electronics cooling systems are far more effective than alternative methods. Is liquid cooling finally ready to break out for implementation at the enterprise level? Will digital enterprise data center owner and internet-facing hyperscale facilities begin implementing liquid cooling other than for small, specialized systems, such as HPC?

1 DCIM is the evolutionary key to the true SDDC. How are you coming on your DCIM adoption? If not, why not?

2 Hyper-convergence and software defined storage, are enterprise users getting the economic ‘bang-for-the-buck’ benefit?

3 If SDI is the full integration of SDN with SDC(ompute) and SDS, how mature is your organization in each of these areas? Is it an area of continuous improvement?

4 Predictive analytics is integral to SDI control (SDIC) and key to data-driven automation. How far along in predictive modelling of data center workload

behaviour is your organization?

The intelligence will lie in the underlying performance data

SOFTWAREDEFINED

This track is focused on the journey towards the true software defined data center that is data-driven and requires automation at every layer of the stack.

SDDC (or SDE – for everything) simply means that no layer of the converged ‘North of the rack’ and ‘South of the rack’ will escape being set free from proprietary hardware, abstracted, virtualized and delivered ‘as-a-service’. This is a long voyage; it requires charts and navigation instruments. It’s foggy and stormy out there. Where’s your ship on the voyage?

If the software defined, autonomous data center is the goal, then the intelligence will lie in the underlying performance data – i.e. data-driven. There’s no layer of the data center infrastructure cake that lacks the ability to gather, analyse, predict, simulate and automate (to the level desired)

2 Hyper-convergence and software defined storage, are enterprise users getting the economic ‘bang-for-the-buck’ benefit?

3 If SDI is the full integration of SDN with SDC(ompute) and SDS, how mature is your organization in each of these areas? Is it an area of continuous improvement?

4 Predictive analytics is integral to SDI control (SDIC) and key to data-driven automation. How far along in predictive modelling of data center workload

behaviour is your organization?

5 The goal of the SDDC is full data center automation. So, what’s the reality?

7 Data lake storage requirements, at least for the near future, will force highly resilient software-

driven data center automation. What does your enterprise now project for its big data needs?

8 In a future where ‘the network is the data center’, SDN and NFV performance are important keys to

business agility and scalability. How future-proof is your network architecture?

This track is focused on the journey towards the true software defined data center that is data-driven and requires automation at every layer of the stack.

SDDC (or SDE – for everything) simply means that no layer of the converged ‘North of the rack’ and ‘South of the rack’ will escape being set free from proprietary hardware, abstracted, virtualized and delivered ‘as-a-service’. This is a long voyage; it requires charts and navigation instruments. It’s foggy and stormy out there. Where’s your ship on the voyage?

If the software defined, autonomous data center is the goal, then the intelligence will lie in the underlying performance data – i.e. data-driven. There’s no layer of the data center infrastructure cake that lacks the ability to gather, analyse, predict, simulate and automate (to the level desired)

6 Robotics are now a part of every industry. Can you see robotics having a key role in data center automation?

workload management. So, is full-stack, software-defined, autonomous workload management the future?

A new ‘North-of-the-rack’ stack may be materializing right before our eyes, although with some components more advanced than others. In this scheme that’s playing out on the data center floors of some innovative open-source leaders right now, this architecture tightly integrates hyper-convergence technology with flash storage, SDN, containers, and OpenStack architectures. Does this represent a leap toward the highly efficient, high-performance open-source, software-defined, data-driven data center. Is this just a pipe dream?

Big Discussions for 2016 | datacenterdynavmics.com 16

OPENSOURCEThis track is focused on the open-source and data-driven data center movement and the transition from proprietary to non-proprietary software and hardware models.

Is the true next-gen data center a big white box? Should MEP infrastructure be standardized, commoditized as the IT side is quickly becoming? Should that be a goal of the open data center movement?

It’s possible to prove that the most cost-effective answer to data center capacity is to in fact grow your own rather than source or cloud-ize. It takes a long-term commitment to IT as a core value of your enterprise. And it takes assuming that systems architecture will radically change. Time to open up, decentralize, disaggregate? Ready?

Open-source, bare-metal, DevOps, Docker containers – all dramatically alter the enterprise data center landscape. OpenStack and Open

Compute Project combined as a data center strategy may profoundly alter views of what should remain on-prem or in colo, and what should move to cloud. If everything else IT is basically evolutionary, this may qualify as disruptively revolutionary. What do you need to understand to begin the open journey?

“Open” can drive costs

down and out

1 The business case for the open-sourcing is compelling. Do

case studies support this? Where are you on the journey now? 2

Standardization and commoditization, are you ready for your servers to be cattle not

pets? The future belongs to the industrial data center.

3 Open-sourcing the physical (MEP) infrastructure: Is this the last frontier? Possible? Desirable? What can and

cannot/should not be standardized? 4 Five open communities worthy of your participation.

How do you choose the right one to fit your technology business need?

5 “Open” can drive costs down and out of the data center structure. But if you’re not committed to it, it’s complicated…

7Baking your own Rasberry Pi will utterly transform your previous

relationship with the server world. But are you ready?

8 IT is the business driver of digital enterprise transformation.

Open source now demands a seat at the table. How do you accelerate this in your organization?

9 How can the intersection of DevOps, microservices, containers and storage transform data center

network architectures as we move into the open, software-defined era?

6 Do you see DevOps as a nerdy monster in the basement, or a

requirement of your digital enterprise strategy? How do you create the DevOps-friendly IT and data center environment? What do they want?

Compute Project combined as a data center strategy may profoundly alter views of what should remain on-prem or in colo, and what should move to cloud. If everything else IT is basically evolutionary, this may qualify as disruptively revolutionary. What do you need to understand to begin the open journey?


This track is focused on assessing risk and managing the security of ever-more distributed mission critical infrastructure and ICT systems.

Cyber-threats are on the rise

Cyber-threat, -crime and -terrorism are on the rise. No single aspect of data center and cloud infrastructure is more mission critical than the ever-growing risk to data, network and physical facilities. How are the best and brightest meeting the challenge? What lies ahead?

Today’s business risk planning requires not just high availability and resiliency in the data center, but also automated disaster recovery, failover, backup and mirroring. N+1, maybe even 2N may now be fully virtual and autonomous. How close are we?

Wait! The IoT is exploding,

but have you thought about the inherent security risks in this huge influx of data on the networks from connected devices? While there’s enormous benefit and opportunity in IoT applications, the whole point is to generate huge amounts of data; how aware are you of possible IoT borne breach risk? What are the

best practices for securing IoT devices and networks from

hacks – whether criminal or malicious in intent?

SECURITY+ RISK

1 Does your enterprise now have an effective cyber security risk assessment, benchmarking and score-

carding program?

5 The new mega data centers of the primary cloud services providers are likely the best in the business on security. What

can you learn from them for your data center? Isn’t this one of the best reasons to move to a true modern cloud services provider?

2 Cloud isn’t inherently insecure (any more than anything else on

the network), BUT because cloud offerings make it easier for business lines to circumvent corporate security protocols, gaps can occur. What are best practices that make it possible for you to have it both ways?

4 Securing physical facilities is really a part of data center design, however, both new risk challenges. Technology

updates, as well as policies and practices, require constant CSO vigilance. What can and should you now be doing? Or at least considering?

3 The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile for all the right reasons, but securely delivering applications and exchanging data is a constant CISO challenge. What are the policies, practices

and technologies to best manage mobile risk?

6 Data center resiliency, has it now moved to being software-defined? Delivered

as a cloud service?7

The cyber security crime and terrorism threat is very real, and very much

in the wheelhouse of the security agencies. Do you have a good working relationship with the authorities?


8 North-South-East-West – network security is becoming evermore complex

as the number of end-points grows exponentially. What can be automated and when can you not trust automation?

CONFERENCES

CEBIT HANOVER Mar 14 – Mar 18 2016

INDONESIA JAKARTA Apr 7 2016

ESPAÑA MADRID Apr 7 2016

ENTERPRISE NEW YORK Apr 19 – Apr 20 2016

MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA DUBAI Apr 25 2016

COLOMBIA BOGOTÁ Jun 2 2016

AUSTRALIA MELBOURNE Jun 21 2016

WEBSCALE SAN JOSE Jul 19 – Jul 20 2016

INDIA BANGALORE Jul 20 - Jul 21 2016

SE ASIA SINGAPORE Sep 14 – Sep 15 2016

COLO + CLOUD DALLAS Sep 27 2016

MÉXICO MEXICO CITY Sep 27 – Sep 28 2016

PERÚ LIMA Oct 19 2016

CANADA TORONTO Oct 24 2016

ZETTASTRUCTURE LONDON Nov 1 - Nov 2 2016

BRASIL SÃO PAULO Nov 8 – Nov 9 2016

HONG KONG HONG KONG Nov 9 2016

CHILE SANTIAGO Nov 17 2016

TURKEY ISTANBUL Dec 6 2016

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