There is no doubt that we are living in a data-driven economy. IDC predicts that by 2025, over 175 zettabytes of data is expected[1]. The current business climate continues to attract an influx of business-critical data from connected devices and IoT and has prompted an increase in demand for e-commerce – all of which are catalysts of data center complexity.
Channel partners are not immune to these complexities, so let’s take a deep dive to understand these challenges.
The Top Data Center Complexities Facing Channel Partners
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1. Supporting End-to-End Solutions Across Hybrid Environments
With the proliferation of disaggregated data across the edge, the public cloud and on-prem data centers, channel partners are being called on to support customers’ ultimate data strategy. The goals include increasing efficiency, reducing costs and enabling new solutions. This means that channel partners must be well-versed on technologies that connect hybrid environments – with minimal to no disruption to the customer business.
2. Protecting Data Against Cyberattacks
Top of mind for any business is ensuring there’s security and compliance across data center infrastructures. From data breaches to server crashes, channel partners must invest in cyber defense. Cybersecurity Ventures projects $1 trillion will be spent globally on cyber protection by 2021. Businesses are looking for strategic partners who can provide the appropriate security solutions and can empower them with cybersecurity skills and postures to better protect their customers.
3. Offering Flexible Solutions and Financing Options
The public cloud has changed the economics of managing customer data. While there are pros and cons of utilizing the public cloud versus an on-premise solution, giving customers access to the latest next-generation technologies while optimizing their IT budget is key. It is an advantage if channel partners have the option only to deploy the technology they need. This shift in the way technology is procured can improve channel partners’ margins.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI): The Data Center of the Future
To reduce data center complexity, increase scalability, improve time to value and lower costs, channel partners can take advantage of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI).
The demand for on-premise data center infrastructure is shrinking as businesses migrate to the cloud to improve agility. By 2023, Gartner projects 70% of enterprises will be running some form of hyperconverged infrastructure[2], up from less than 30% in 2019. By 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers.
HCI's original claim to fame was having a lower cost of entry than traditional IT infrastructure. It is a scalable infrastructure consisting of virtualization, compute networking and storage with a software-defined management system.
According to MarketsandMarkets™[3], the global HCI market size is expected to grow from $7.8 billion in 2020 to $27.1 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.1% during the forecast period. Major growth drivers for the market, according to the report, include several advantages of HCI, such as reduced capital and operational expenditure and disaster recovery capability.
Since its inception, HCI vendors have continued to evolve HCI's capabilities to support hybrid cloud strategies. Here are some of the benefits HCI brings to channel partners:
a) Distributed storage – features such as deduplication, compression, encryption and backup, which has made it attractive to use the architecture for distributed workloads.
b) Simplified management – aids in determining the skills and workload of the IT staff to support the HCI servers.
c) New capabilities to support edge, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and new economic models – are incorporated in the management systems to help users manage the infrastructure and install and upgrade the HCI servers.
Watch out for part two of this series, in which we discuss the trends that will shape the data center industry. Don’t want to wait? Comment below and let's discuss how Tech Data can help channel partners reduce data center complexities.
You can also visit Tech Data’s website to learn more about our integration services.
[1] IDC White Paper, sponsored by Seagate, Data Age 2025: The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core, #US44413318, November 2018
[2] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, 25 November 2019
[3] MarketsandMarkets™ - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market by Component (Hardware and Software), Application (ROBO, VDI, Data Center Consolidation and Backup/Recovery/Disaster Recovery), End User, Organization Size, Enterprise and Region - Global Forecast to 2025.
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