Network Communications News (NCN) December 2016 | Page 12

COLUMN

talking point

Connectivity is King!
Darren Watkins, managing director of Virtus Data Centres,
explains how companies can take advantage of ‘Big Data’.

B

ig Data is a big deal. Global
market analyst IDC says that
the Big Data business analytics
market will hit $203bn by 2020,
driven by the availability of
data, a new generation of
technology and a cultural shift
to data driven decision making. But Big
Data is useless without the ability to
access, process and analyse masses of
information. And as we consume and
connect more and more geographically
dispersed devices and clouds, our
appetite for network connectivity and
bandwidth becomes stronger.
Connectivity between the data,
the data centre and public clouds is
critical if companies are to make Big
Data meaningful. The result is that
connectivity is critical to the complete
data centre solution so providers have
been rethinking their models from
offering space and power, to a new
model of bandwidth, resilience and a
range of connectivity options. What
should businesses look for in their data
centre providers?

Data centre connectivity
Businesses today expect and require
low latency and reliability, with zero
tolerance for downtime. As connectivity
is critical, some providers have made
it their mission to develop networking
services that deliver ultra resilient
solutions. Data centres have made the
investment to introduce a fully diverse
multi sub-duct network so carriers can
easily interconnect and businesses can
cross connect to a multitude of public
clouds. Having every fibre owner/reseller
Darren Watkins says
Big Data is driving
the next stage in
the development
of an increasingly
connected world.

in a data centre means that every other
possible carrier or related supplier is
just a cross connect away. It is the depth
of fibre assets in a data centre that
make this possible, not the breadth of
individual carriers.

Cross connections
to public clouds
A cross connect replaces the public
Internet connection between a user
and cloud provider with a dedicated,
private network allowing peer-topeer connections. This is one of the
main factors driving the demand for
connectivity. Nevertheless, enterprises
remain in the early stage of the shift
to cloud. The uptake will be driven by
businesses developing digital ways of
working as mobile and the Internet of
Things (IoT) become the norm. These
technologies will shift bandwidth needs
and applications toward the edge of
the network and closer to customers
resulting in more complex relationships
between systems and applications.
We will end up living in a hybrid cloud
world made up of traditional, private
cloud, managed cloud and public cloud
architectures.
What a lot of companies don’t know,
is that they can get a better level of
performance if they take the services
within buildings in which the clouds
are housed or data centres that have
the depth of fibre assets to make the
connection to their chosen cloud simple
and reliable. Bringing cloud services
to an enterprise’s own building has
challenges that can be avoided by using
the services from within the data centres
where the clouds live. Being located
in the same facility means the cloud
services are a simple cross connect away.
Connectivity to the right carriers
is critical. This ensures that multiple
public clouds can be accessed, which
increases performance. The term for
this is ‘on-ramp to cloud’. Companies
should be aware that whilst some data
centre providers can build the best high
performance platform and a facility that
is cost effective, without connectivity

provisioning on-ramp to other clouds,
businesses won’t be able to adopt a
hybrid cloud strategy.
The most effective providers make
it easy to connect public and private
clouds. This connectivity is important in
a hybrid model as companies need it to
reach multiple cloud providers and other
enterprises, exchange traffic and connect
systems, platforms and applications.
Cross connects offer several
benefits; they are dedicated to one
organisation, so the network bandwidth
and latency remain stable, they increase
cloud reliability and the connection is
more secure because no other users
pass traffic across that connection.

Emerging ecosystems
Some data centres are offering
‘carrier neutral’ super connectivity to
enable users to recognise that highly
connected hubs will save time and
money connecting the required clouds
together. They are building on their
investment by developing marketplaces
or internal sales hubs for clients and
vendors to meet and select products
and services resident in the same
data centre. As these hubs grow, they
become more attractive to software,
content and service providers who can
connect to collaborative services and
be in the same facility as their potential
clients. The success of this will further
enhance the data centre’s position as
the connectivity broker. IoT and Big Data
truly drive the need for connectivity. As
organisations begin to understand that
data analytics helps them to become
more relevant and innovate, the demand
will escalate. For all of this to work,
devices need to communicate. As a
result, more industries will use public
cloud to gather data, which will increase
the demand for more space and power.
In turn, greater importance will be put
on data centres, their efficiency, total
cost of service and connectivity. Whether
it is wireless or wired, it is the need to
exchange data that makes connectivity
the defining factor in the future of the
inter-connected world.

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