Data Center In A Data Driven World
Last year the world just changed! The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, set in motion events that transformed every aspect of the global economy. While we have entered a ‘New Normal’ this digital disruption is continuing and is set to further redefine businesses across industries and sectors and its impact will be seen for years to come. The world is witnessing exponential creation and consumption of data on the foundations of the contact-less economy; WFH, school and entertainment-from home, gaming, surveillance, are driving this shift, and we are consistently seeing an increase in the requirement of data storage solutions.
Growing Data And Evolving Storage Requirements
The exponential data growth is not only fuelling new Big Data and Fast Data applications, but it is also creating complexities in the way that data is being captured, preserved, accessed, and transformed. With large data sets being shared across diverse applications throughout an extended lifecycle, the dynamic nature of these more demanding, high-scale workloads is exceeding the limits of traditional data infrastructure. With this, the era of data-centric computing is here and, fortunately, data storage is more cost-effective than ever, with compressed and reduced-vibration data centers.
While technology advancement is enabling new solutions, the critical driver why we need new solutions is data growth. Both, consumer and enterprise, are generating massive data, contributing to overall capacity growth. According to World Economic Forum, it is estimated that over 463 exabytes of data will be generated every day by 2025 globally. This is equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day1.
Data Center - The Backbone Of Enterprise Data Storage Solutions
With the increasing amount of data, evolving data workloads, and valuable insights from data, we are witnessing the modernization of data centers. The Indian data center market is observing robust growth in the era of virtualization and cloud computing. According to Crisil Research report, the data center market is expected to log a 25-30% CAGR to reach $4.5-$5 billion by fiscal 2025.2 Data storage managers have realized that data centers need technology upgrades that replace an ageing data center infrastructure with innovative technologies
Desing Infrastructure Are Defined By Software
To meet the level of flexibility and predictable performance needed in today’s data center, a new architectural approach has emerged where compute, storage, and network are disaggregated into shared resource pools and are treated as services. The ‘composable’ part refers to making the resources available on-the-fly and creating a virtual application environment with the optimum performance required for the workload demands.
Reducing Cost Of Data Centers
Cooling thick shelves of drives that are working hard in the data center are one of the prime challenges faced by any data center. Patented technology ArcticFlowTM Thermal Zone Cooling is a creative way to solve that problem by dividing the drive bays up into their cooling zones, front and rear. They provide air ducting inside the enclosure to bring in cool air and to exhaust warm air more efficiently.
Additionnally, vibration is the HDD head nemesis. Innovations in Western Digital’s range of JBODs and storage servers reduce the vibration of individual drives by up to 62% compared to traditional enclosures.
Next-Gen Technologies Enabling Today’s Data Centers
A game-changer for data centers and applications, especially for emerging technology workloads, Internet of Things (IoT), and real-time analytics, NVMe is designed to maximize flash storage benefits over SATA & SAS, delivering high performance and low latency, laying the foundation for next-generation purpose-built infrastructure. NVMe based SSDsare the future-ready solution that lets you power new, data-intensive applications. These SSDs are ideal for extreme performance in mixed workload applications and reduces cost.
With the need for quick response to digital demands, increasing the pace of infrastructure scalability became crucial. This is why a physical and logical separation of the hardware and software were required, and hence, software-defined storage solutions took form. In these platforms, the storage goes into a shared pool, from which the SDS controller flexibly carves out storage for applications and services.
Future Of Data Infrastructure
According to IDC, the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years. It is about time that we are ready to harness the data to drive business efficiencies and for the greater good of the society. As a leader in the data infrastructure industry, Western Digital is committed to driving a new level of scalability, efficiency and responsiveness to help businesses overcome the challenges of data at scale and harness the power of data.
