Data centre has become more like a meta system: Shahin Khan, OrionX

Shahin Khan, Technology Analyst and Founding Partner at OrionX, talks to Pratima Harigunani and interprets the IT infrastructure scenario that has shaped the data center story in the last few years. He also hints at a new force to reckon with – Data Superiority.

There have been a lot of technological changes during the last 10 years. How will you describe the evolution of data centres during these years? 

The data centre has become more like a system, a meta-system. It has become the infrastructure that houses data and algorithms and ensures quality service for apps. IT has become more complex but also more efficient. Two major predictions did not come true, however. The data centre was predicted to disappear into pubic clouds but that did not happen. It continues to thrive in public clouds, on-premise and at the edge where its growth will be significant. It was also expected to be standardised around a small number of technology choices, but it has become more heterogeneous, more specialised and more customised.

“DC was predicted to disappear into pubic clouds but it continues to thrive in public clouds, on-premise and at the edge where its growth will be significant.”

Which are the areas that have witnessed the most important changes?

Without question, the major driver of data centres today is artificial intelligence workloads. AI applications are enabled by a virtuous cycle. It is cheap to collect massive amounts of data, there is hardware and algorithms that can make sense of that data and need massive amounts of it, and there are economically viable uses for the resulting insights and automation.

How will you describe the impact of IoT, ever-escalating data requirements, and ongoing cloud adoption on data centres?

IoT is leading to edge computing where data centres of different sizes and capabilities are necessary. There was a time when you expected a smartphone on one end, a public cloud at the other, and nothing in between. Instead, what we see emerging is a giant fabric of resources from the sensor to the cloud. In this fabric, IoT is the fountain of data. The vast majority of data will be generated and ultimately consumed outside the cloud because the information contained in every ‘thing’, whether a consumer product or a building or a city or a ship, will be harnessed, so we can manage, predict, automate, control and so on.

“What we see emerging is a giant fabric of resources from sensor to cloud. In this fabric, IoT is the fountain of data.”

The proverbial volume, variety, and velocity of the data make it too slow and expensive to ship it all back to the cloud. It necessitates several stages between IoT and the cloud. And at every stage, you must decide whether to process, store or transmit the data. And that means more data centres everywhere.

Are our data centres adapting well to VMs, cloud workloads, modularisation, solar-powered servers, and localisation?

Data centres have substantially caught up with virtualisation where possible and bare metal where necessary. The prevailing model is scalable capability with a cloud consumption model, hardware configurations that ensure the quality of service, and advanced development tools that ensure developer productivity.

How serious are challenges like data sovereignty, cooling, power efficiency, space, IT real estate costs, and other issues?

One big lesson of AI is that you need a lot more data than you thought you did. On the face of it, that means data superiority is necessary for information superiority. Basically, whoever has more data, just a sheer volume of data is poised to win. This immediately puts data privacy, digital rights and data sovereignty at the centre stage. It also ultimately determines where exactly a given data set is stored and a given workload runs.

“Power cost is an important issue. Apart from improvements in ‘results/watt’, we also see a move to renewable sources of energy and carbon neutral facilities.”

Power costs are the next important issue. In addition to improvements in ‘results/watt’, we also see a move to renewable sources of energy and carbon neutral facilities.

By Pratima Harigunani

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