How the Modern Data Center Extends Across Remote Locations Due to Automation and Connectivity

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How the Modern Data Center
Extends Across Remote Locations
Due to Automation and Connectivity
A discussion on how new demands from the industrial edge, 5G networks, and hybrid deployment
models will lead to more diverse types of data centers in more places.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Vertiv.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect podcast
series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and
moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into data center strategies.
Enterprise IT strategists are adapting to new demands from the industrial edge, 5G
networks, and hybrid deployment models that will lead to more diverse data centers
across more business settings. That’s the message from a broad new survey of 150
senior IT executives and data center managers on the future of the data center.
IT leaders and engineers say they must update their data centers to exploit 5G and edge
computing field opportunities, as well as to transform their multiple data centers to
leverage the explosive growth of data coming from nearly every direction.
Yet, according to the Forbes-conducted survey, only a small percentage of businesses
are ready for the decentralized and often small data centers that are needed to process
and analyze data close to its source. Stay with us to unpack how more self-healing and
automation will be increasingly required to manage such dispersed IT infrastructure and
hybrid deployment scenarios.
Here to help us learn more about how modern data
centers will extend to the computing edge and beyond
is Martin Olsen, Vice President of Global Edge and
Integrated Solutions at Vertiv[tm]. Welcome, Martin.
Martin Olsen: Thanks a lot, Dana.
Gardner: Martin, what’s driving this movement away
from mostly centralized IT infrastructure to a much
more diverse topology and architecture?
Olsen: It’s an interesting question. The way I look at it
is it’s about the cloud coming to you. It certainly seems
that we are moving away from centralized IT or
Olsen

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centralized locations where we process data. It’s now more about the cloud moving
beyond that model.
We are on the front steps of a profound re-architecting of the Internet. Interestingly,
there’s no finish line or prescribed recipe at this point. But we need to look at processing
data very, very differently.
Over the past decade or more, IT has become an integral part of our businesses. And
it’s more than just back-end applications like customer relationship management (CRM),
enterprise resource planning (ERP), and material requirements planning (MRP) systems
that service the organization. It’s also become an integrated fabric to how we conduct
our businesses.
Everybody’s meeting at the edge
Gardner: Martin, Cisco predicts there will be 28.5 billion connected devices by 2022,
and KPMG says 5G networks will carry 10,000 times more traffic than current 4G
networks. We’re looking at an “unknown unknown” here when it comes to what to expect
from the edge.
Olsen: Yes, that’s right, and the starting point is well beyond just content distribution
networks (CDNs), it’s also about home automation, so accessing your home security
cameras, adjusting the temperature, and other things around home automation.
That’s now moving to business automation, where we use compute and generate data to
develop, design, manufacture, deploy, and operate our offerings to customers in a much
better and differentiated fashion.
We’re also trying to improve the customer experience and how we interact with
consumers. So billions of devices generating an unimaginable amount of data out there,
is what has become known as edge computing, which means more computing done at
or near the source of data.
In the past, we pushed that data out for
consuming, but now it’s much more
about data meets people, it’s data
interacting with people in a distributed IT
environment. And then, going beyond
that is 5G.
We see a paradigm shift in the way we use IT. Take, for example, the amount of tech
that goes into a manufacturing facility, especially high-tech manufacturing. It’s exploding,
with tens of thousands of sensors deployed in just one facility to help dramatically
improve productivity, differentiate, and drive efficiency into the business.
In the past, we pushed that data out
for consuming, but now it’s much
more about data meets people, it’s
data interacting with people in a
distributed IT environment.

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Retail operations, from a compute standpoint, now require location services to offer a
personalized experience in both the pre-shop phase as well as when you go into the
store, and potentially in the post-shop, or follow-up experience.
We need to deliver these services quickly, and that requires lower latency and higher
levels of bandwidth. It’s increasingly about pushing out from a central standpoint to a
distributed fashion. We need to be rethinking how we deploy data centers. We need to
think about the future and where these data centers are going to go. Where are we
going to be processing all of this data?
Where does all the data go?
Gardner: The complexity over the past 10 years about factoring cloud, hybrid cloud,
private cloud, and multi-cloud is now expanding back down into the organization --
whether it’s an environment for retail, home and consumer, and undoubtedly industrial
and business-to-business. How are IT leaders and engineers going to update their data
centers to exploit 5G and edge computing opportunities despite this complexity?
Learn How Self-Healing and Automation
Are Required to Manage Dispersed IT Infrastructure
Olsen: You have to think about it differently around your physical infrastructure. You
have the data aspect of where data moves and how you process it. That’s going to sit on
physical infrastructure somewhere, and it’s going to need to be managed somehow.
You should, therefore, think differently about
redesigning and deploying the physical
infrastructure. How do you operate and manage
it? The concept of a data center has to transform
and evolve. It’s no longer just a big building. It
could be 100, 1,000, or 10,000 smaller micro data
centers. These small data centers are going to be
located in places we had previously never
imagined you would put in IT infrastructure.
And so, the reliance on onsite technical and operational expertise has to evolve, too.
You won’t necessarily have that technical support, a data center engineer walking the
halls of a massive data center all day, for example. You are going to be in places like
some backroom of a retail store, a manufacturing facility, or the base of a cell tower. It
could be highly inaccessible.
You’ll need solutions that offer predictive operations, that have self-healing capabilities
within them where they can fail in place but still operate as a function of built-in
redundancy. You want to deploy solutions that have zero-touch provisioning, so you
The concept of a data center
has to transform and evolve.
It’s no longer just a big
building. It could be 100,
1,000 or 10,000 smaller
micro data centers.

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don’t have to go to every site to set it up and configure it. It needs to be done remotely
and with automation built-in.
You should also consider where the applications are going to be hosted, and that’s not
clear now. How much bandwidth is needed? It’s not clear. The demand is not clear at
this point. As I said in the beginning, there is no finish line. There’s nothing that we can
draw up and say, “This is what it’s going to be.” There is a version of it out there that’s
currently focused around home automation and content distribution, and that’s just now
moving to business automation, but again, not in any prescribed way yet.
So we don’t want to adopt the “right” technologies now. And that becomes a real
concern for your ability to compete over time because you can outdate yourself really,
really quickly if you don’t make the right choices.
Gardner: When you face such change in your architecture and potential decentralization
of micro data centers, you still need to focus on security, backup and recovery, and
contingency plans for emergencies. We still need to be mission-critical, even though we
are distributed. And, as you point out, many of these systems are going to be self-
healing and self-configuring, which requires a different set of skills.
We have a people, process, and technology sea change coming. You at Vertiv wanted
to find out what people in the field are thinking and how they are reacting to such
change. Tell us about the Vertiv-Forbes survey, what you wanted to accomplish, and the
top-line findings.
Survey says strategic change necessary
Olsen: We wanted to gauge the thinking and gain
a sense of what the C-suite, the data center
engineers, and the data center community were
thinking as we face this new world of edge
computing, 5G, and Internet of things (IoT). The top
findings show a need for fundamental strategic
change. We face a new mixture of architectures that
is far more decentralized and with much more
modularity, and that will mean a new way to
manage and operate these data centers, too.
Based on the survey, 11 percent of C-suite executives don’t believe they are currently
updated even to be ahead of current needs. They certainly don’t have the infrastructure
ready for what’s needed in the future. It’s much less so with the data center engineers
we polled, with only 1 percent of them believing they are ready. That means the vast
majority, 99 percent, don’t believe they have the right infrastructure.
There is also broad agreement that security and bandwidth need to be updated.
Concern about security is a big thing. We know from experience that security concerns
We face a new mixture of
architectures that is far
more decentralized and
with much more
modularity, and that will
mean a new way to
manage and operate
these data centers, too.

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have stunted remote monitoring adoption. But the sheer quantity of disparate sites
required for edge computing makes it a necessity to access, assess, and potentially
reconfigure and remotely fix problems through remote monitoring and access.
Vertiv is driving a high level of configurability of instruments so you can take our
components and products and put them together in a multitude of different ways to
provide the utmost flexibility when you deploy. We are driving modularized solutions in
terms of both modular data center and modularity in terms of how it all goes together
onsite. And we are adding much more intelligence into our offerings for the remote sites,
as well as the connectivity to be able to access, assess, and optimize these systems
remotely.
Gardner: Martin, did the survey indicate whether the IT leaders in the field are
anticipating or demanding such self-configuration technologies?
Olsen: Some 24 percent of the executives reported that they expect more than 50
percent of data centers will be self-configuring or have zero-touch provisioning by 2025.
And about one-third of them say that more than 50 percent of their data centers will be
self-healing by then, too.
That’s not to say that they have all of the
answers. That’s their prediction and their
responses to what’s going to be needed to solve
their needs. So, 29 percent of engineers say
they don’t know what percentage of the data
centers will be self-configuring and self-healing,
but there is an overwhelming agreement that it
is a capability they need to be thinking about.
Vertiv will develop and engineer our offerings
going forward based on what’s going to be put
in place out there.
Gardner: So there may be more potential points of failure, but there is going to be a
whole new set of technologies designed to ameliorate problems, automate, and allow
the remote capability to fix things as needed. Tell us about the proper balance between
automation and remote servicing. How might they work together?
Make intelligent choices before you act
Olsen: First of all, it’s not just a physical infrastructure problem. It has everything to do
with the data and workloads as well. They go hand-in-hand; it certainly requires a
partnership, a team of people and organizations that come together and help.
29 percent of engineers say
they don’t know what
percentage of the data
centers will be self-configuring
and self-healing, but there is
an overwhelming agreement
that it is a capability they need
to be thinking about.

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Driving intelligence into our products and taking that data off of our systems as they
operate provides actionable data. You can then offer that analysis up to non-technical
people on how to rectify situations and to make changes.
These solutions also need to communicate
with the hypervisor platforms -- whether
that’s via traditional virtualization or
containerization. Fundamentally, you need
to be able to decide how and when to
move your applications and workloads to
the optimal points on the network.
We are trying to alleviate that challenge by making our offerings more intelligent and
offering up actionable alarms, warnings, and recommendations to weigh choices across
an overall platform. Again, it takes a partnership with the other vendors and services
companies. It’s not just from a physical infrastructure standpoint.
Gardner: And when that ecosystem comes together, you can provide a constellation of
data centers working in harmony to deliver services from the edge to the consumer and
back to the data centers. And when you can do that around and around, like a circuit,
great things can happen.
So let’s ground this, if we can, to the business reality. We are going to enable entirely
new business models, with entirely new capabilities. Are there examples of how this
might work across different verticals? Can you illustrate -- when you have constructed
decentralized data centers properly -- the business payoffs?
Improving remote results is good business
Olsen: As you point out, it’s all about the business outcomes we can deliver in the field.
Take healthcare. There is a shortage of healthcare expertise in rural areas. Being able to
offer specialized doctors and advanced healthcare in places that you wouldn’t imagine
today requires a new level of compute and network that delivers low latency all the way
to the endpoints.
Imagine a truck fitted with a medical imaging suite. That’s going to have to operate
somewhat autonomously. The 5G connectivity becomes essential as you process those
images. They have to be graphically loaded into a central repository to be accessed by
specialists around the world who read the images.
That requires two-way connectivity. A huge amount of data from these images needs to
move to provide that higher level of healthcare and a better patient experience in places
where we couldn’t do it before.
Fundamentally, you need to be
able to decide how and when to
move your applications and
workloads to the optimal points on
the network.

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So 5G plays into that, but it also means being able to process and analyze some of the
data locally. There need to be aggregation points throughout the network. You will need
compute to reside at multiple levels of the infrastructure. Places like the base of a cell
tower could become a focal point for this.
You can imagine having four, five, six times as much compute power sitting in these
places along a remote highway that is not easily accessible. So, having technical staff be
able to troubleshoot those becomes vital.
There are also uses cases that will use augmented reality (AR). Think of technicians in
the field being able to use AR when they dispatch a field engineer to troubleshoot a
system somewhere. We can make them as effective as possible, and access expertise
from around the world to help troubleshoot these sites. AR becomes a massive part of
this because you can overlay what the onsite people are seeing in through 3D glasses or
virtual reality glasses and help them through troubleshooting, fixing, and optimizing
whatever system they might be working on.
Again, that requires compute right at the endpoint
device. It requires aggregation points and
connectivity all the way back to the cloud. So, it
requires a complex network working together. The
more advanced these use cases become -- the
more remote locations we have to think through --
we are going to have to deploy infrastructure and
access it as well.
Gardner: Martin, when I listen to you describe these different types of data centers with
increased complexity and capabilities in the networks, it sounds expensive. But are there
efficiencies you gain when you have a comprehensive design across all of the parts of
the ecosystem? Are there mitigating factors that help with the total cost?
Olsen: Yes, as the net footprint of compute increases, I don’t think the cost is linear
with that. We have proven that with the Vertiv technologies we have developed and
already deployed. As the compute footprint increases, there is a fundamental need for
driving energy efficiency into the infrastructure. That comes in the form of using more
efficient ways of cooling the IT infrastructure, and we have several options around that.
It’s also from new battery technologies. You start thinking about lithium-ion batteries,
which Vertiv has solutions around. Lithium-ion batteries make the solution far more
resilient, more compact, and it needs much less maintenance when it sits out there.
So, the amount of infrastructure that’s going to go out there will certainly increase. We
don’t think it’s necessarily going to be linear in terms of the cost when you pay close
It requires aggregation
points and connectivity all
the way back to the cloud.
So, it requires a complex
network working together.

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attention to how, as an organization, you deploy edge computing. By considering these
new technologies, that’s going to help drive energy efficiency, for example.
Gardner: Were there any insights from the Forbes survey that went to the cost
equation? How do the IT executives expect this to shake out?
Energy efficiency plus partnerships for the win
Olsen: We found that 71 percent of the C-suite executives said that future data centers
will reduce costs. That speaks to both the fact that there will be more infrastructure out
there, but that it will be more energy efficient in how it’s run.
It’s also going to reduce the cost of the overall business. Going back to the original
discussion around the business outcomes, deploying infrastructure in all these different
places will help drive down the overall cost of doing business.
It’s an energy efficiency play both
from a very fundamental standpoint
in the way you simply power and
cool the equipment, and overall, as
a business, in the way you deliver
improved customer experience and
how you deliver products and
services for your customers.
Gardner: How do organizations prepare themselves to get out in front of this? As we
indicated from the survey findings, not that many say they are prepared. What should
they be doing now to change that?
Olsen: Yes, most organizations are unprepared for the future -- and not necessarily
even in agreement on the challenges. A very small percentage of the respondents, 11
percent of executives believe that their data centers are ahead of current needs, even
less so for the data center engineers. Only 44 percent of them say that their data centers
are updated regularly. Only 29 percent say their data centers even meet current needs.
To prepare going forward, they should seek partnerships. Get the data centers
upgraded, but also think through and understand how organizations like Vertiv have
decades of experience in designing, deploying, and operating large data centers from a
physical infrastructure standpoint. We use that experience and knowledge base for the
data center of tomorrow. It can be a single IT rack or two going to any location.
We take all of that learning and experience and drive it into what becomes the smallest
common denominator data center, which could just be a rack. So it’s about working with
someone who has that experience, already has the data, and has the offerings of
configurable, modular solutions that are intelligent and provide accessibility to access,
assess, and optimize remotely. And it’s about managing the data that comes off these
It‘s an energy efficiency play both … in
the way you simply power and cool the
equipment, and overall, as a business, in
the way you deliver improved customer
experience and how you deliver products
and services for your customers.

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systems and extracts the value out of it, the way we do that with some of our offering
around Vertiv LIFE Services, with very prescriptive, actionable alarms and alerts that we
send from our systems.
Very few organizations can do this on their own. It’s about the ecosystem, working with
companies like Vertiv, working closely with our strategic partners on the IT side, storage
networks, and all the way through to the applications that make it all work in unison.
Think through how to efficiently add compute capacity across all of these new locations,
what those new locations should look like, and what the requirements are from a security
standpoint.
There is a resiliency aspect to it as
well. In harsh environments such as
high-tech manufacturing, you need
to ensure the infrastructure is
scalable and minimizes capital
expenditure spending. The modular
approach allows building for a future
that may be somewhat unknown at
this point. Deploying modular
systems that you can easily augment and add capacity or redundancy to over time --
and that operate via robust remote management platforms -- are some of the things you
want to be thinking about.
Gardner: This is one of the very few empirical edge computing research assets that I
have come across, the Vertiv and Forbes collaboration survey. Where can people find
out more information about it if they want more details? How is this going to be
available?
Olsen: We want to make this available to everybody to review. In the interest of sharing
the knowledge about this new frontier, the new world of edge computing, we will
absolutely be making this research and study available. I want to encourage people to
go visit vertiv.com to find more information and download the research results.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how enterprise
IT strategists are adapting to the new demands from the industrial edge, 5G networks,
and hybrid deployment models, and how we expect that to spread to more diverse data
centers and their use across more business settings.
And we have learned, according to a recent Forbes-conducted survey, that only a small
percentage of businesses are ready for such decentralized architectures and are often
Deploying modular systems that you can
easily augment and add capacity or
redundancy to over time – and that
operate via robust remote management
platforms – are some of the things you
want to be thinking about.

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looking to small data centers to process and analyze data close to its source. It’s a
whole new infrastructure model.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Martin Olsen, Vice President of Global Edge
and Integrated Solutions at Vertiv. Thank you so much, Martin.
Olsen: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this sponsored
BriefingsDirect data center strategies Interview. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Vertiv-sponsored discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your community and do come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Vertiv.
A discussion on how new demands from the industrial edge, 5G networks, and hybrid deployment
models will lead to more diverse types of data centers in more places. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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