Why the future of infrastructure is adaptive

The pace of business is faster than ever, as industry disruptors and the growing influence of digital ratchets up the pressure on traditional verticals. In response, organisations are repositioning themselves to be more innovative and to react quicker, turning to digital transformation and digitalisation to edge ahead of their competitors.

The pressure for greater speed and agility is evident in the decreasing time to market for new start-ups. For example, Malaysia-based video-on-demand service iflix successfully launched a full-fledged offering barely nine months after its incorporation. But while the streaming video firm was able to heavily leverage the public cloud to pull this off, many enterprises do not have the luxury of a cloud-only approach.

Traditional enterprises are typically burdened with a large number of legacy applications and systems that cannot be easily migrated to the public cloud. Moreover, compliance regulations and increasing concerns over privacy and control are forcing CIOs to rethink the types of services that are deployed on the public cloud.

Fortunately, developments on the private cloud front mean that enterprises have additional options. Specifically, the development of highly flexible hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and the maturity of private cloud platforms such as OpenStack means enterprises can now tap into many of the advantages of cloud technology from within their own data centres.

For a start, private clouds built on these components give enterprises the ability to rapidly resize and scale clusters of compute and storage to meet current requirements without having to consider the status of individual servers and appliances. With availability and redundancy built-in, this compares favourably against the inefficient approach of having to redeploy or requisition new hardware for each new service.

Of course, the development of new services and capabilities is never solely about the hardware. Genuine innovation stems from active collaboration between employees, and having the requisite systems and processes to encourage and support it. New development paradigms such as continuous integration and DevOps also offer enterprises the opportunity to enhance existing capabilities.

Equipped with adaptive hardware and new agile methodologies, enterprises can hence focus on developing new capabilities without being mired in infrastructure limitations and technical challenges. Ultimately, the ability to pivot easily and experiment puts them in a good position to take advantage of new developments such as machine learning and augmented reality.

One final component that is often overlooked in infrastructure deployments is the adaptiveness of colocation facilities. The bastion of private cloud deployments, these crucial facilities are designed with redundancy and security firmly in mind, and operated by highly-trained specialists. While the tendency is to view data centres as nothing more than secure rooms with power and cooling piped in, the reality is that they must evolve with the changing needs of enterprise IT.

For a start, many older data centres may not have sufficient power density and cooling to work efficiently with power-hungry HCI hardware. This can manifest in different ways, including long lead times as special cooling hardware are hastily installed, or prices that are disproportionate with the additional space requested. Moreover, leases for them are often rigid, multi-year contracts that offer little leeway for the fluid nature of modern IT deployments.

Thankfully, the situation is fast changing. Major data centre operators such as Singtel have evolved their offerings to align with the today’s adaptive infrastructure. Aside from more flexible lease terms, enterprises can also request for customisations to better support their unique needs. Elsewhere, software-defined network (SDN) network connectivity is available to the rack, with self-provisioned bandwidth that can be dialled up and down from a web console.

The result is an adaptive data centre that enterprises can use to establish their future-proof deployment.