Review of Data Centre World London 2013

I haven’t attended an AFCOM Data Center World Conference in almost five years because when I did, my impression was that the exhibits were not well attended by would-be clients of the company I was working for at the time. In fact, that year, we saw only two potential customers in our booth. People that have attended it recently have told me much of the same. They received less than a handful of good prospects to target.

Fast forward to 2013 when I’m temporarily living in the UK and have an opportunity to attend Data Centre World in London. I was pleasantly surprised to find, in my opinion, a much better event – and it was free for qualified attendees! Perhaps that was the difference. I found the conference program to be comparable to AFCOM’s and the exhibit floor to  be much more crowded. The other refreshing thing was that while software defined networks (SDN) were mentioned, they were not the overwhelming theme. The program stuck to its intended subject matter, the data center market, its networks, facilities, clouds and hardware.

Some of my observations from attended presentations and visits to some of the booths:

• Data center space demand throughout the world is expected to level off within the next five years due to server virtualization. SSE Telecoms showed this chart to illustrate this:

           It was reiterated by CBRE in its presentation – a snapshot is below.

 

• More than 75% of network traffic stays within the data center. Thus the trend to higher data rates and flattening of the data center network.
• The vertical market customer drives data center needs. In other words, if you’re a healthcare organization, your data center may look much different from a state/local government data center.
•  “Shadow IT” is driving change in local area networks (LAN) and data centers. Bring your own device (BYOD) forces company networks to be more open to the employees using them, but poses possible security issues for the IT department.
• Co-location is slowly becoming the norm for even smaller businesses due to the expenses associated with maintaining ownership of the data center.
• Many connectivity vendors were there and they seemed to be getting healthy traffic in their booths. Some that I visited were 3M, Brand-Rex, CommScope, Corning, Draka/Prysmium Group, Fujikura, HellermannTyton, Lynx Data Cabling, Methode, Ortronics and Telegärtner. All were showing either copper and fiber solutions (or both) for the data center.

Real Estate Trends, BYOD, and the Millennials Effect on Enterprise Cabling and Connectors

By Thomas Debiec

The Urban Land Institute's "Emerging Trends in Real Estate" outlines some interesting trends in the real estate market.  Businesses are shifting their requirements from offices that place a premium on quality and size to more compact spaces.  These spaces encourage productivity, efficiency and collaboration.  They may disregard cubicles in favor of workbenches and rely on cloud computing to take the place of file cabinets.

Driven by the more than 85.4 million Millennials, these young workers desire the benefits of mobility and interconnectedness using the most up-to-date communications devices allowing them to operate anywhere.  Companies are embracing this concept.  In December, Gartner reported that 70% of survey respondents are planning to implement “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policies in the next 12 months.  Companies like Electronic Arts (EA) are moving away from windows-based laptops in favor of iPads, MacBooks and smartphones.  Approximately 10,000 phones currently fall under their BYOD policy.  EA is also replacing offices and cubicles with open office space.

From the structured cabling standpoint, these trends could have a profound impact, not only on the volumes of cable and connectors, but also require rethinking the cabling-systems design.  There will be less focus on tethering every workspace back to the telecommunications room (TR) and more focus on wireless and wireless performance. While we don’t expect TRs to disappear, we do see the number of physical connections to the traditional work-area-outlet (WAO) decreasing over time. The new version of the WAO will be the wireless access point (WAP).