Do you understand the evolution of the data center value equation?

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As enterprise data centers shift from an owner-owned model to a hybrid model that includes a range of management services, that is, a multi-cloud ecosystem that balances local ownership and managed services, enterprise businesses are trying to keep up with the times. To understand future trends, Simon issued an insight briefing that carefully studied how and why the data center value equation developed, and how the shift to a new value equation could be the secret of success.

Value equation before 2000

In the past decade, the digital economy is increasingly driven by data. According to Gartner, 2012 is the first time in history that the total amount of global digital information has exceeded ZB, or 1 trillion gigabytes of information. By 2020, IDC reported that 59 ZB of data had been generated, recorded, copied and consumed. As new digital services are deployed around the world, more connected devices come online, and businesses become more dependent on data centers, this number is expected to jump to 175 ZB by 2025.

The data centers of the early 1940s were represented by large, complex computers used to perform calculations. With the adoption of the first commercial microprocessor (released by Intel in 1971), the PC operating system eventually gave birth to the client-server model, which promotes the sharing of unique resources among multi-services, multi-applications, and multi-users. The biggest boom came during the dotcom bubble of 1997-2000, when organizations began to build businesses on the Internet and demanded faster speeds, lower latency and more computing power.

Before 2000, the data center was thought of as a simple business function-basically a tool and cost center. The data center value equation at that time can be summarized as follows:

Data center value = (enterprise efficiency + employee efficiency + market performance)

This equation leads to a linear and mechanized approach to managing, deploying, and operating data centers, and the system is considered necessary, but not necessarily critical. While downtime is still seen as a problem, it is far less serious than it is today-to some extent, some companies are able to continue to operate even with data center outages or partial loss of capacity.

New value equation

Fast forward to today, the latest report shows that by 2023, spending on digital transformation will account for more than 53% of all ICT investment, up from 36% today-all of which are driving data center growth and creating huge demand for digital infrastructure. In Interop's 2020 infrastructure status report, 41 per cent of respondents said at least 30 per cent of the IT budget would be spent on data centres, while 1/5 said data center spending would exceed 40 per cent of their budgets.

With the global epidemic in 2020 and the unprecedented growth of network traffic driven by remote users and business operations, it is not surprising that data centers have once again received large-scale attention. In the latest AFCOM data center health report, 70 per cent of respondents reported an increase in network traffic within their infrastructure since the outbreak, with 36 per cent reporting an increase of more than 40 per cent. Because data center and business leaders agree that their infrastructure is much more important than they thought a few years ago, the new data center value equation looks more like:

Data center value = (enterprise efficiency + employee efficiency + market performance) x digital innovation

The new variable here is digital innovation. In addition to terminology, innovations in digital infrastructure and data center space translate directly into surviving market and industry fluctuations, as we saw during the 2020 epidemic. Enterprises and organizations that adopt this new value equation are prepared with innovative strategies that can more effectively support remote users and remote business operations. They can adapt to survival quickly.

The value of data centers in China is increasing with each passing day.

Today, with the acceleration of the new infrastructure, with the start of the project of "calculating the number from the east to the west", China's attention and investment in the data center has been continuously strengthened. While paying attention to the value equation of the data center, we should also pay attention to improving the computing power and layout of the data center.

According to the statistics of authoritative institutions, the scale of data centers in China has reached 5 million standard racks and the computing power has reached 130EFLOPS (1.3 trillion floating-point operations per second). With the continuous infiltration of digital technology into all fields of economy and society, the demand for numeracy in the whole society is still very urgent, and it is expected that it will continue to grow at a rapid rate of more than 20% every year. Computing power has become an important infrastructure for the development of the national economy. Accelerating the construction of computing power will effectively stimulate the innovation vitality of data elements, accelerate the process of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, and give birth to new technologies, new industries, new business type, and new models.

At present, most of the data centers in China are distributed in the eastern region. Due to the increasing shortage of land, energy and other resources, it is difficult to sustain the large-scale development of data centers in the eastern region. On the other hand, the western region of China is rich in resources, especially renewable energy, which has the potential to develop data centers and undertake the needs of computing power in the east. To this end, we should give full play to the advantages of China's system and mechanism, integrate the layout from a national point of view, optimize the allocation of resources, and improve the efficiency of the use of resources.

From the perspective of the development of the times and policy trend, strong computing power, reasonable layout, green low-carbon, integration and innovation are the value of the data center in the new era. Guided by the national strategy and guided by the market demand, Cyber Security and Informatization magazine and IT Operation and maintenance Network held the 2022 Smart data Center Summit (IDCS) in Beijing with the theme of "New Computing Power, New pattern and New momentum". The purpose is to help users understand the development trend of data centers in the new era and provide users with reliable data center solutions. Promote Chinese enterprise users to build data centers in line with the times and promote the high-quality development of China's digital economy.

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