The datacentre space is seeing a number of changes and this adversely affects how telecommunications players operate, according to TPG Telecom head of product, Nick Pachos.
He was speaking at one of the sessions at the AWS Summit 2016 in Sydney.
“Connectivity drives innovation and as a carrier, we’re continually trying to push the barriers of connectivity. We are continuing to deliver bandwidth at low process to our end users and this removes barriers to drive innovation within an organisation,” he said.
Pachos attributed a Huawei study, which found that from a global investment perspective, business investment in datacentres is cyclic and based on Cloud technology.
“There are a lot of different dimensions and a lot more connectivity in the market. This results in more enablers to come in, in addition to more devices. No longer is a user connected to a desktop, they use three or four devices each now.”
Pachos mentioned internal enterprises are spending less in building datacentre environments. On the other hand, service providers are growing their investment significantly year on year in datacentres.
“That will continue through to 2019 and beyond. Every five years, we’re doubling the amount of money spent on enterprise datacentres. The primary driver for that is Cloud computing.
“When we look at where the money is being spent, in hard dollar terms, $3.8 billion is being spent on worldwide ICT investment and $2.27 billion is spent on telecommunications investments,” he added.
As such, Pachos claimed the vast majority of spend is heading towards the telco avenue, with 73 per cent of that coming from services and 27 per cent going into infrastructure.
“Whilst we are building a lot of infrastructure, there is much more money going into the services rather than infrastructure. Fundamentally, it does mean that the cost per piece of infrastructure is less.”
According to Pachos, a Cisco study also found that by 2019, 83 per cent of global datacentre traffic will come from Cloud services and applications.
“In 2014, we’ve had 1.3ZB of data in a datacentre. This is expected to be 2.1ZB going into Cloud. Traditional datacentre traffic is less than Cloud datacentre traffic. By 2019, traditional datacentre traffic will grow by 0.5ZB, yet the Cloud datacentre traffic is going to grow four fold.
“There’s going to be massive acceleration in more and more data in the Cloud. However, there is still a lot of other data going around. Firstly, 73 per cent will be within the traditional datacentres itself, nine per cent will be between datacentres, and 18 per cent between datacenters and end users,” he said.
As such, he said telcos need to work out how to deal with those amounts of traffic, considering today’s datacentre footprint is much smaller. That poses a connectivity issue in getting there from a technology perspective and in making it financially viable.
“So, user expectations are uncompromising and network performance is a prerequisite to successful adoption of Cloud services. Providers such as us will continue to invest in such infrastructures,” he added.
