INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
How the MEA can embrace the
changing status quo
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Ehab Kanary, Managing
Director with Commscope,
shares his insight on how
the data centre industry can
prepare for the future with
constant change becoming
the new status quo.
I
n places like the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), the government is reimagining
what transportation and education will
look like in the future. They’ve appointed the
world’s first Minister for Artificial Intelligence
and more than half a million people from
22 countries have applied to participate in
the One Million Arab Coders programme. My
colleagues and I are debating whether or
not flying cabs may soon be a reality.
Constant change is the status quo across
the Middle East and Africa (MEA). And we’re
seeing change in the world of data centres.
Indeed, where data centres once simply
acted as storage units for data, they now
compute, analyse and process information,
and they need to do this in real time. It’s
little surprise then, that one of IDC’s top
predictions for 2018 is the ‘modernisation’
of data centres, in which they make ‘heavy
use of predictive analytics to increase
accuracy and reduce downtime’.
Fibre everywhere
The advent of 5G is going to change
everything and network operators and data
centre managers alike will need to prepare.
The sheer volume of devices communicating
with each other and with humans will lead to
a significant increase in the amount of fibre
being deployed, for example, although much
needs to be done behind the scenes before
this can happen.
Wireless networks need a lot of ‘wired’
assets to effectively deliver fibre backhaul
to the core and edge. The densification of
cell sites, adding more cell sites to increase
The machines are coming. The Middle East
and Africa will see a six-fold growth in IP
traffic from 2015 to 2020, according to
Cisco. Billions of machines are required to
keep these connections running, and by
talking to each other, they put an extreme
amount of stress on any network.
With 5G coming to market in the next five to
10 years, and IDC predicting that the market
for connected devices could reach US$7
trillion by 2020, this stress is only going to
become more profound, not least on data
centres, which must adapt to cope with the
additional demand. Machines can process
information nearly as fast as they can receive
it. In the data centre in particular, decisions
are made instantaneously, requiring a strong
supportive network backbone.
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the amount of available capacity, will be
required to enable 5G, and we’ll also see
a number of different types of powering
solution come to market, offering operators
a cost-efficient way of powering up many
devices at the edge of the network.
Deploying copious amounts of fibre is
a best-case solution, however, and may
not always be feasible. The most efficient
scenario in allowing fast machine-to-
machine commun ication would be to deploy
high density fibre from the start, future
proofing the investment by using a modular,
high-speed platform capable of supporting
multiple generations of equipment.
Not all plain sailing
As the number of devices continues to
grow, and the volume of machine-to-
machine communication with it, there
will, inevitably, be problems. Machines
are only as good as their algorithms and
programming, after all, which makes them
vulnerable to manipulation by humans and
even other machines.
As a result, there are certainly concerns
around data privacy; with more devices than
people in the world, it’s fair to say that we’ll
become increasingly vulnerable to hackers
and data thieves.
With additional concern that machines will
take over jobs previously only performed
by humans, the explosion in machine-to-
machine technology will require a change in
mind-set for it to be fully adopted.
Ehab Kanary, Managing Director
at Commscope
However, with network operators and data
centre managers taking steps now to ensure
that they are ready for what’s ahead, the
ground will be laid for the rise of the machines
in an increasingly connected world. n
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