The expected growth in Hyperscale didn’t quite meet expectations in 2019, following the excitement of 2017 and 2018. Some of those that were put on the back burner should start to make progress in 2020/21. There was a continued take up of cloud and colo, growth in public cloud with the big three taking the lions share – AWS, MicroSoft and Google. It will be interesting to see Oracle’s performance over the first half of the new decade as they invest further into new facilities and infrastructure to host their cloud services.
For edge computing relying on location, latency and bandwidth has increased with IOT demands. It is not an instead of but complimenting traditional Enterprise facilities, colo and cloud to get closer to the data source or end users. Where 5G is rolling out enterprise opportunities will follow along with edge facilities. Edge growth in other regions will be more of a steady increase until their network is upgraded. There has been and will continue to be a wider take up of SD-Wan. SD-WAN is critical for businesses adopting cloud services, it acts as the nerve center between the business location, campus, IoT, cloud and data center/colo.
Cisco seeing the need for wider scope have rolled out ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) – ACI Anywhere to the cloud – particularly to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure environments. It provides customers flexibility to run and control applications anywhere they want across private or public clouds or at the edge while maintaining consistent network policies across their entire domain.
Over the next decade sustainable targets (ST) will become much more of an issue for all industries and organisations. Their digital infrastructure will come under greater scrutiny and demands on products and services supplied for their Digital infrastructure, cloud and colo provider will determine this sectors future.
The slow burners are likely to see much more opportunity as change to meet ST look towards innovations in Open Source, Liquid Cooling and Renewable Energy. Couple this with greater regulations around fire and hazard protection due to climate change and Lithium Ion batteries for UPS, CPR spreading to wider regions, data center design may look very different from the legacy facilities of the last ten years. It is without doubt that new generations will come into the industry and some of our current experts will be taking a back seat or retiring therefore there is a greater need to train and to implement up-skills throughout a career path. Attracting young people into the industry in the first place needs much more work and publicity or we may not be able to service it in the very near future.
Digital Infrastructure Partners ended the year in Montreal with a conference that brought together energy/network suppliers, telco’s, colo’s, facility owners/constructors, consultants and investors – the complete digital infrastructure set. Bringing so many people from local and international organisations together was hugely rewarding, we were asked by so many to come back in 2020 that we have put it on the agenda for November.
Digital Infrastructure Partners will be in Chicago, North Virginia, Paris, London and Montreal …. hope to see you there!
