Sean Brady, Avanade South Africa

Is cloud computing nullifying the need for on-premises data centres?

One of Gartner’s data centre trends for the coming years is ‘hyper scale’ data centres; vendors such as Google and Amazon which have huge data centres to serve external customers. Some argue that because of cloud computing providers like these, the need for on-premises data centres is declining.

However, on a local scale, challenges in connectivity, cost, security, availability and compliance (to name a few) could be holding businesses back from going the on-premises route.

According to Barry Hatfield, business development manager of cloud services at Internet Solutions: “While the advent of cloud computing is definitely driving down the need for on-premises data centres, there is still a business case for them under certain circumstances.”

He says commercial data centres in SA are not as prolific as in Europe and the US, and connectivity to commercial data centres is not yet ubiquitous. “In a number of cases, an on-site data centre is still the only choice due to location and connectivity options. We expect to see this changing in SA as the connectivity challenges are addressed, however, as on-premises data centres are already considered a very expensive option.”

Darren Rowe, MEMA regional sales enablement manager at HP Enterprise Services, believes the move away from on-premises data centres started several years ago within traditional outsourcing models, but new sourcing models are influencing the data centre location dynamic. “There is certainly no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to data centre provisioning, and requirements such as security, business continuity and regulatory compliance will always determine where an organisation’s data is located. So although the ‘hyper scale’ data centres do fit the bill for some and continue to offer a lower cost alternative, it’s more likely suited to data, which requires less stringent security, compliance and availability criteria.”

Gareth Tudor, CEO of Altonet, believes the relevance of on-premises data centres depends on the size and scale of the data centre that is required, as well as the organisation’s ability to implement and manage a data centre effectively. “There are two trends affecting the data centre space,” he says.

“Firstly, they are becoming increasingly specialist, requiring niche skills to design, build and manage. Secondly, data centres are also increasing in capacity, while to a lesser extent, decreasing in physical space, thanks to more powerful server technology and virtualisation. This requires a degree of expertise that the average medium to large company does not necessarily possess, and therefore data centre outsourcing and cloud data centres are becoming more viable options.”

He says the need for on-premises data centres is naturally still relevant, but declining as the benefits of third party, outsourced, hosted and cloud data centres are realised. Sean Brady, business development manager at Avanade South Africa, agrees that on-premises data centres are still relevant. “Moving off-premises to the public cloud is not something an organisation does overnight. Moving to the cloud is a journey, and organisations need to identify work streams and services to move to the public cloud.”

According to a study conducted by Avanade, only 5% of all organisations are adopting a cloud-only model. “The reasoning is that organisations have legacy applications still in use that require an on-premises model. Organisations also don’t want to introduce too much change at once, and opt for a hybrid approach of public and private cloud. There is also a misconception in the market around security issues and data sovereignty.”

VIRTUALISATION

Gartner also comments that hosted virtual desktop (HVD) workloads are growing, and HVD workloads are among the fastest-growing server workloads. They believe this will increase the demand for virtualised servers.

Darren Rowe, HP Enterprise Services

According to Brady, there has been a massive adoption of virtualisation technologies in South African enterprises, but there are still many data centres out there still reliant on physical servers. “These organisations may fear change and prefer to go about the business as usual,” he says.

Hatfield concurs, saying although SA has historically lagged the rest of the world in this space, technologically the gap has reduced significantly. “Industry leaders are now able to compete on a global scale. The challenge now lies in the mindsets of the average enterprise IT department, where there is still often resistance to embracing these new technologies,” he believes.

Rowe says: “I’ve seen a level of reluctance to take this approach into the desktop area – it is rarely about the virtualisation technology’s ability to do the job, but rather the uncertainty around the management of change that comes with any end-user intervention. And of course, getting the business case to stack up can be challenging if desktop virtualisation is not based on end-user profiling.”

Tudor sees South Africa as being on par with the developed world, specifically in the data centre space: “While in size, SA cannot compete with the likes of the USA, the top data centres in this country are world-class facilities that meet global best practice standards, and virtualisation is well entrenched. This is driving other data centre providers to bring their offerings up to this level, and comply, further raising the state of our data centres.”

BRING YOUR OWN

HVDs solve the vast majority of security and governance issues posed by the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, according to Hatfield. “In addition, these environments are often preceded by Web-based solutions, as organisations slowly migrate to HVD. The combination of these technology stacks are driving the same behaviour in SA’s data centre development: South African data centres are required to cater for continually increasing power and cooling density requirements per rack, without significant changes in space requirements. As a result, commercial data centre operators are required to continually innovate as new data centres are deployed.”

Brady believes organisations need to start thinking about using desktop virtualisation or presentation virtualisation to cater for BYOD. “SA’s data centres could look at using these virtualisation technologies in their data centres to help them manage the end devices by delivering a managed virtualised desktop with all the required security features. Physically managing the devices individually would be a daunting task,” he says.

According to Rowe, both virtualisation and BYOD in the workplace will create additional storage requirements, and in turn, require more space to house the technology. “However, the advancement in virtualisation and hardware technologies means that form factors can be kept small and physical hardware can be eliminated through virtualisation. Overall, I don’t think these will have a significant effect on South African data centre space requirements, but there is no doubt in my mind that it will challenge the organisation and suppliers’ power consumption, with the prevalence of more data flowing through the system and the increased demand for storage – that’s where appropriate attention data management becomes important.”

The BYOD trend has a huge impact on business operations, says Tudor, but is not something that affects the data centre space. “Virtualisation, on the other hand, is having a major impact already, particularly on physical space requirements and energy costs. Virtualisation has changed the nature of the data centre. However, the BYOD trend has not really hit South Africa yet, but when it does, it could have unintended consequences for management. Companies should therefore be doing their own research on overseas trends in BYOD, so as to understand what the impact could be on their own organisation,” he says.

TRENDS

The hot topic locally is the cost of electricity, and this is forcing data centre-providers to rethink how they contract with their customers, says Rowe. “Transparency in electricity costs appears to be the current way of addressing the issue.

He also believes the continual improvement in connectivity quality and redundancy makes it easier to be comfortable with the idea of off-shore data centre locations.

According to Brady, by moving services to cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon and Google, there will be a decrease in building out massive physical data centres. “However,” he says, “there is still plenty of opportunity for data centre providers to manage integration of all the cloud solutions and services.”

According to Tudor, one of the major global trends is towards massive data centres such as the likes of Amazon and Google. “Local data centres are increasing in size as well (albeit not on the same scale as overseas) and this is enabling third party providers to offer greater economies of scale. Virtualised third party data centres are a major trend, both locally and internationally, and even some of the world’s largest IT companies have made the move towards third party data centres. The trend is most definitely towards virtualisation and outsourcing, and we can expect this trend to accelerate in the future,” he concludes.