By Vikas Sharma, Founder and Director of Hi-COM
In today’s technology-driven world, data centres have become a crucial component of modern IT infrastructure. These sophisticated facilities are responsible for centralising the management of vast amounts of data that modern businesses generate and rely on every day. It has facilitated enterprises to store their precious data in a single place, making it simpler to access and analyse.
This in turn has improved the overall business efficiency while reducing the effort of duplication and providing a better insight into the business operations. However, in several ways, data centres are hardly a new innovation. Since the advent of computers, data centres have played a crucial role in business operations and have taken different forms, from on-premises to cloud and edge computing.
The initial years
Data centres can be traced back to the 1960s, in the mainframe era. Here, the world experienced a rise in powerful mainframe computers, which initially raised a demand to secure and centralise these large machines. IBM’s transistorised computer, TRADIC, helped the data centres emerge from their military operations into commercial usage. Primarily, these spaces were known as “computer rooms” or “machine rooms,” which were designed to control environmental factors such as temperature and humidity.
As the technology kept on advancing, the demand for the purity of the data increased; however, the computing power was costly. As a result, several organisations started to outsource their requirements rather than maintain the huge computer rooms. Overall, the
culmination of the early computing inventions paved the way for modern-day data centres.
The internet era
In the 1980s and 2000s, the huge computers of the previous decades were replaced by personal desktops. The internet emerged, the microprocessors boomed, and client-server computing started to take centre stage. The connectivity became fast, and it drove the development of the data centres, which catered to the growing numbers of computer users. The enterprises started to build their server rooms and facilities, encompassing thousands of servers. In addition, several businesses also emerged in the domain of operating data centres for public clients. In addition, the idea of virtualization technology became a reality, enabling a single physical server to host multiple software environments. However, with the rising demand for on-premise data centres, a new requirement for server cooling has also emerged. In this era, air cooling thrived; however, later, the cooling system was updated to liquid cooling for high-performance computing (HPC).
At the dawn of the new millennium
In the first decade of the new millennium, there were myriad innovations that supported more adaptable servers for data centres. Some of the leading enterprises started providing cloud storage services to customers who could use them on demand. This was the initiation era of the transition from dedicated enterprise hosting to larger shared data centres, with both approaches now co- existing. There were several improvements in the data centre services, where shared hosting, managed services, ISPs, ASPs, and more gained relevance. Moreover, the virtualization technology also experienced several advancements that significantly assisted the transition to the cloud.
Running virtual machines on cloud servers also became the norm for users. In addition, database-backed applications started to gain ground, along with mobile applications, which started to get increasingly connected to the cloud.
The cloud and edge revolution
Over the last decade, the cloud has grown bigger, and organisations have been striving to adopt it to gain an edge in the market. The markets were flooded with the emergence of public, private, and hybrid clouds, which catered to the dynamic needs of organizations. Furthermore, the three basics for businesses, namely, IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service), started to become the norm. The cloud soon began to transform from developer-friendly to developer-driven, where application developers started to take complete advantage of the cloud.
Today, as technological advancements are happening at a rapid pace, the growth of the wireless industry and the implementation of new-age technology have led to the shift of data centres from on-premises to the cloud. However, with the increasing number of devices and users, performing computation on-premise or on the cloud is not an efficient approach. This is where edge computing enables data computation to be close to the data source. As a result, it can be used effectively to deliver faster services with minimum latency. In addition, the data is less time-sensitive and can be shared across larger data centres for either big data analysis or long-term storage.
All things considered
Data centres are continuing to evolve with respect to technological advancements and the changing demands of businesses. In the near future, several data centres will continue to shift from the ownership-based model to the SaaS model. According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global data centre market is anticipated to reach $517.17 billion by 2030. Companies will be able to offload much of the burden associated with running a data centre by moving from on-premises data centres to the cloud, which offers access to computing, storage, and networks as a commodity. Furthermore, as the data will be increasingly consumed and produced at the edge, the future of the data centres will serve more devices at the edge.
