Network Communications News (NCN) August 2017 | Page 38

KNOW HOW
The data centre of tomorrow
– more power, fewer humans
Moore’s Law, termed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore a little over 50 years ago, stated
technology would rise exponentially, with transistors doubling in quantity every two years.
Steve Kyprianou, managing director at TSI, examines this progress and looks at the data
centre of tomorrow and what it could look like.
M
oore’s predictions
have become the
golden rule by
which processing
has increased
and, in fact, modern statistics
suggest this rise sees more of an
18-month cycle.
Today, there is more processing
power in a single handheld device
than that which NASA had at its
disposal during the moon landings.
So, as this increase continues,
where does that leave our data
centres in the future?
38 | August 2017
There are many considerations,
not least the structure of the data
centre but also the purpose of our
data usage.
In addition, we will need to
consider flexibility, cost, speed –
and coping with it. Then there are
the regulations around energy and
cross-nation applications and, of
course, the technology itself and
disaster recovery.
It appears to be a minefield,
but is it one that we’ll adapt to in
the same way our foreseers were
predicting 50 years ago?
One fear is that processing
power will outstrip the capabilities
of the human brain – but I’m
happy to leave that notion to
Hollywood for the time being and
just examine how the future will
look and how it may impact us, our
clients and our clients’ data.
What’s next?
The days of being tied to a single
networking vendor or technology
are on the demise as we see Open
Standards allowing separation