Consider how much data you use in your daily life. The average cellphone plan offers users a few gigabytes a month to do with as they please; you can search the Internet, stream movies and TV shows online, and even pay bills.
Now, imagine you’re a growing business with hundreds or thousands of customers relying on your services. The amount of data required to meet their needs is going to be significantly more than your basic office building or startup location can churn out — in fact, the average power density of a single data center is 100 times more than that of a large commercial office building. Businesses in this data-hungry day and age are desperate for speed, storage, and smooth connectivity, but what about the future?
According to an article posted on DataCenterKnowledge.com, it isn’t more that people want — more speed, more space, more power — it’s better.
“The one size fits all approach is no longer effective for data-intensive workloads. What is required are capabilities that enable more control over the blend of resources that each need so that optimized levels of processing, storage, and network bandwidth can be scaled independent of one another.
Optimization is the goal. As companies grow, expand, and diversify, the uniform ratio of resources that had been used to address all computing, storage, and bandwidth requirements is not going to be enough. Not all business have the same needs: flexibility is essential.
The future lies in composable-disaggregated infrastructures (CDIs). CDIs use virtual servers created out of independent resource pools (made up of computing, storage, and network devices) instead of partitioned resources that are hardwired as hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs); HCIs combine those three resources into one single “virtualized system” which requires more processing power to handle more speed, storage, etc. CDIs, on the other hand, can be provisioned and re-provisioned as needed to suit the unique and personal demands of a business’s workload. Essentially, HCIs represent the more while CDIs represent the better.
Technological development and data usage go hand-in-hand. As we continue to produce more data-heavy tech — and incorporate its use more casually into our everyday lives and businesses — we’re going to need a data center that can keep up. The future, it seems, is CDI-based.