The IT industry does a wonderful job in advance positioning the next nice innovation. We’ve been simply a step away from the internet of things (IoT) for over 20-years, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been around for as long as we can remember, and solid-state memory is about to take over from disk drives and tape, speeding access, saving space, energy and resources. Maturity of a technology is mapped using a ‘hype cycle’ idea model, in easy terms… as time moves forward the ‘hype’ becomes reality and ‘quantum leaps’ are ever nearer.

Preparing for tomorrow’s future is crucial for business survival

In data center network communications, multiple technologies are evolving to deliver growth of emerging, data-intensive applications from e-health and media and content delivery, to sensor connected devices and automotive vehicles.

With volumes of data set to grow exponentially, the tactic of gathering, storing, processing, and transmitting across the data center is seriously hindered without an infrastructure that meets latency and bandwidth performance requirements currently, and for the predictable future.

Indeed, once technologies like AI and Machine Learning (ML) become common, individual information sets can run to 100s of terabytes. Meanwhile, M2M data is predicted to outstrip enterprise and personal knowledge within the next 5years. This increase in data traffic is already making bottlenecks among traditional data centers, with each gateway and connection reducing the general performance potential of the system.

With an understanding of the opportunities on the market and also the technologies influencing change we can set up better and prepare our structures to work at the foremost acceptable levels. We can learn from the hyper-scale designers who are planning systems with equipment manufacturers to optimize necessities for use, to draw these aggressive applications into the cloud. 

Each of those technological advances reflects the rise of a worldwide digital economy that is making a demand for larger network speed and performance from the internet backbone right into the core of the data center.

Key challenges for the infrastructure network are the ever-growing demand for quicker speed – 10GE, 25GE, 40GE, 50GE and 100GE nowadays, with 200GE – 400GE with expected rollout as early as 2019. In conjunction with new network architectures designed to maximize performance, the physical infrastructure should be designed to enable fast and seamless deployment of the latest switching technologies.

Data bottlenecks can still be a growing issue if infrastructure and data center businesses target short-term fixes. Network infrastructure is as important as data center power and cooling, without appropriate investment it may considerably reduce each life cycle and ROI.