Planned growth.
What can be done in the face of a shortage of building land? In the world’s cities, buildings are shooting upwards because of the lack of space available. Across the globe, increasing numbers of people are moving to cities. The UN estimates they will be home to three-quarters of all people on Earth within just a few years. How high will the buildings grow?
Digitization of all sectors of business, trade and industry is leading to rising demand for computing power. IT managers find themselves wondering whether they should build and operate their own data centre or have one provided as a service. A customised IT environment can prove to be a dead end after just a few years – for instance, where updating the existing structure is extremely costly, or the available space is no longer sufficient to expand a central data centre.
Increasing numbers of companies are sourcing part of their IT services from the cloud. The advantage of this is that it eliminates the one-off investment costs for in-house IT systems while also increasing the flexibility to respond quickly to growing resource needs. It also does away with the need to find in-house IT specialists.
According to an analysis by Techconsult, 50 per cent of software solutions are expected to come from the cloud by the end of 2018. The trend is moving towards a “data centre as a service” model, in which companies source very different services from the cloud and thus expand their existing IT landscape to suit their individual needs. They can choose between a private cloud operated on site using proven and safe components, including servers, storage and network systems (“on premises”), or an external private cloud (“off premises”) that a provider operates in a data centre.
Rittal and its partner iNNOVO Cloud offer flexible infrastructure and cloud solutions as “IT as a service” models. These services are based on the RiMatrix BCC (Balanced Cloud Center) platform, where components such as racks, cooling and power supply are available as predefined modules. These modular data centres are suitable for both standard applications and for more demanding tasks such as high-performance computing (HPC), SAP Hana and big-data applications. Customers have the option of operating these data centres themselves or sourcing them as a managed service from a private cloud.