Whether in the local or cloud, the data center is the basis for us to enjoy the digital life. This infrastructure carries all the services we know and love: from online shopping and inventory tracking, to real-time map navigation and live content.
As the world’s demand for data and newer, better services continues to grow, data centers are breaking the limits again and again – storing and processing all available data more efficiently.
2022 will be the first year of great changes in the data center architecture, in which memory and storage are the main drivers. This is an era in which architecture can be freely combined. Service providers and enterprises are increasingly concerned about sustainable development and the ever hot issue – data security.
In 2022, the data center will experience a revolution due to the new memory and storage system. Under the pressure of data center infrastructure, all kinds of continuously innovative memory will be the key to reduce data intensive workload. The most exciting change is the rise of DDR5, because it is a leap in performance and the first time that the demand of the data center has really driven the memory standard.
We will also see the emergence of the first memory solution based on computing fast link (CXL, Compute Express Link), which is the first step towards a composable data center and memory shared pool. This year will also be a year for us to welcome HBM3 — once HBM3 is paired with the general central processing unit (CPU), it will greatly promote the development of on-chip memory.
For the data center, these innovations will lead to an unprecedented memory hierarchy and a more composite infrastructure including shared computing, memory and storage resources. For enterprises and service providers, this means better performance and lower total user costs for many types of workloads and applications.
Energy efficiency can also be improved by moving towards more flexible and more composable infrastructure. By reducing the over allocation of resources, data center operators can reduce their impact on the environment.
According to the data report of the US Department of Energy, the largest data center needs more than 100 million watts of power, which is enough to power about 80000 households. There are 8.5 million data centers on the earth, which have a huge impact on energy and water consumption, carbon emissions and waste disposal.
If enterprises want to become more strategic in the field of sustainable development, they need to pay close attention to how to manage infrastructure in an energy-saving way, and also need to pay attention to how to strengthen the use of green technologies such as low-power memory and storage to build infrastructure. Enterprises looking at the sustainable development of data centers from the perspective of strategic business will not only regard memory and storage as equipment components, but will regard them as the key thrust to achieve business and sustainability goals and truly composable infrastructure.
Security is not just a matter of data encryption. Data encryption is being widely recognized and accelerated, but security also includes the reliability and availability of data and services. Security is not limited to encrypting and protecting data and specific equipment, but more importantly, ensuring the security and availability of key data and services.
Today, a real data center security plan must consider the security of the data itself, not only to guard against data leakage and blackmail software, but also to consider phishing attacks, social engineering, and disaster recovery.
In addition, we will see the rise of automation and self-healing technologies, which can mitigate the impact of data center vulnerabilities. Service providers and enterprises are expected to continue to view security issues from a broader perspective, allowing customers and employees to integrate real life and virtual life, while ensuring the safe and smooth operation of the data center.