Datacentres have witnessed a significant transformation over the past 5 years. The number of servers being deployed has increased dramatically. Customers want information anytime and anywhere. Even data is growing at a rate of 50% CAGR.

Enterprises are continuously deploying more applications to support their business growth. Companies like Google and YouTube, that offer user driven content, are also experiencing user driven server growth, adding dramatically to the server growth rate worldwide, as well as across Asia.

Intel believes innovation is the key

R Ravichandran, sales director, Intel South Asia, believes that in order to cater to the growing amount of data at the datacentre level, it is important to innovate, "At Intel, we’re constantly working with OEM vendors to try and come up with innovation at the silicon component level, platform level, and rack and server level."

Driving power efficient architecture to process massive amounts of data is one of Intel’s current key focus areas. Intel recently launched two quad-core 50-watt server processors that consume 35-60% less power compared to its existing 80 and 120-watt server products.

Intel is also involved in enabling platform innovation, and as Ravichandran points out, "Virtualisation and consolidation have become important issues for CIOs and CTOs. Hence, we came up with Virtualization Technology (VT) on our processors. Most of the low level computing can be performed by the VT unit, hence increasing performance."

Ravichandran also mentions that the company is working with VMware, for a program called VirtaulizedASAP. As part of this program, Intel has taken the leading OEM hardware vendors and certified ISV solutions.

Server technology market three years back was more or less dominated by the proprietary RISC based systems. However, various reports suggest that the RISC/proprietary market is showing a decline. Commenting on this, Ravichandran mentioned, "The decline in demand of RISC based systems is mainly due to the fact that these technologies are proprietary. One is dependent on the vendor for their hardware, software, applications, fixes etc. I think we’re seeing a shift where customers don’t want to get into a proprietary lock in, and they want that freedom of choice in their configurations."

Dynamic and responsive datacentres are the future

According to Ravichandran, the end state for CXOs would be in having a dynamic and responsive datacentre, which means that at the highest end”considering disaster recovery as an example, one can mirror a 200-300 server datacentre from location A to location B within minutes.

"I think many people are getting into load balancing, failover, etc. These practices have conventionally been followed at the server level, but the ultimate goal would be to see if it can be done at the datacentre level. People are already working in this direction, and in doing so they are modularizing their hardware and software infrastructure between compute, storage, and I/O," mentioned Ravichandran.

"Today, different departments have different levels of infrastructure. But if you could come up with a blue print, where you could say here is my pool of resources, I can dynamically mix and match depending on your needs, and if I can get to a utility billing type of concept, I think that’s where the market is moving. So instead of fixing a certain cost of hardware and software per department, you’re billing them like electricity, or water on a usage basis."

Ravichandran believes that this kind of a system will offer a lot of flexibility to CIOs and CTOs. At the same time, he believes that providers of such kinds of utility computing services need to be flexible enough, wherein if the workloads or demands change, delivering additional infrastructure capabilities quickly and efficiently should not be a problem.