The next generation of datacentres will support automation and will be highly efficient, said an Intel executive.
Speaking to ZDNet Australia's sister site ZDNet Asia at IDC's InfraVision conference held in Singapore on Thursday, William Wu, Intel's Asia-Pacific regional marketing manager for server platforms, noted that the complexities and challenges faced by datacentres today are driving the need for the next generation of datacentres to be "intelligent, automated and efficient".
Wu went on to describe a generation of intelligent datacentres that have the ability to run on their own, requiring "very little human intervention". So little, in fact, that the only time manual labour will be needed is when new servers are installed, he added.
"No one's supposed to go into the datacentre [and] you can do everything remotely," he explained. "There must be a lot of intelligence in [a datacentre] ... [to] be able to predict what's going on, what's the next requirement, what's the next failure ... Fundamentally, that should be the future of datacentres."
In addition, next-generation datacentres should not be illuminated, Wu noted. Lights generate heat, he said, adding that datacentre administrators will then have to look at ways to remove that heat.
However, he noted that "there is still a long journey" ahead before datacentres reach that level of sophistication. "Some of the technologies available today can [be] used to achieve that, [but] some of them are not ready yet," Wu said.
"For example, if I want to run everything out of DC [power], today, I can't buy a server [that uses DC]. I have to customise it," he said. "So, it'll be very nice if, eventually, the market comes out with some kind of standard that can be purchased from any [server] vendor."
Another technology that is "critically missing" is the automation of line migration, he said, referring to the migration from one server to another server without interrupting the application.
"This technology can enable a lot of wonderful things for IT, but it's not quite there today," Wu said. Wu predicts that the first of these next-generation datacentres are likely to appear in the next two to five years.
