DCN June 2017 | Page 26

big data & IoT MEETING THE IOT CHALLENGE Today’s data centres are facing unprecedented pressure to keep up with the intense demands of the Internet of Things. Valerie Maguire, director of standards & technology at Siemon, provides an outlook on new solutions beyond 100Gb/s Ethernet, including cabling and connectivity options that will enable data centre infrastructure to meet the need for increased data speed and throughput driven by the IoT and Big Data. T he deluge of device generated data resulting from the explosive rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) challenges the ability of today’s data centre architectures to meet the need for faster and higher volume communication between server, storage, and core networking devices. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI), the total amount of data created, but not necessarily stored, by devices will more than quadruple from 2015 to 2020. Furthermore, the huge volume of device generated data that is stored in the data centre and available for analysis (Big Data) is expected to increase 10-fold from 2015 to 2020. This astounding growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication brings many great advantages to organisations, however, data centre networking equipment and applications must quickly evolve in order to be able to facilitate and streamline people-to- machine and M2M communication. According to Cisco, Western Europe will have an average of 9.9 devices or connections per user by 2020. In addition, adoption of emerging IP-enabled technology such as PoE-enabled lighting and digital signage, is on the rise. The challenge for network cabling and data centre infrastructure designers is how to facilitate and streamline communication between and within the 26 | June 2017 The challenge for network cabling and data centre infrastructure designers is how to facilitate and streamline communication between and within the enterprise, data centre, consumer, and mobile environments.