Energy efficiency, speed and agility in the delivery of services or products, in an economy of scale and digital, are the great differentiating elements of the data centers of the future. This is the assessment of the CEO of DatacenterDynamics for Spain and Latin America, José Luis Friebel, who also says that “everything seems to indicate that we are already moving towards the fully automated and software-defined data center”.
According to Friebel, Brazil represents practically half of the entire data center market in Latin America (more than 40% of the total). To debate the theme, the ABES portal interviewed the executive because of the realization of the DatacenterDynamics Converged Brazil 2016, event that happens between the days November 8th and 9th, in São Paulo. Follow:
What are the main technological innovations in data centers in recent years?
We are going through a very important moment, where everything is changing and at great speed. IoT, Big Data, Smart Cities, e-commerce and Cloud Computing are, simultaneously, the result and the engine of the digital transformation that we are currently witnessing and, for the moment, the professional community is only sure of one thing: that all these trends converge towards the obvious need for more data processing capacity.
The waves generated by the data “tsunami” are already leaving their marks throughout Brazil and, in many cases, their impacts have already completely transformed the profile of the Brazilian IT ecosystem. So it's not surprising that technologies like hyperconvergence, Flash storage, SDN and NFV are starting to make their mark in data centers globally. In fact, everything seems to indicate that we are already on the way to the fully automated and software-defined data center. On the other hand, new designs such as microdatacenters or webscale are the order of the day. Finally, it is clearly obligatory to mention Cloud Computing, the great enabler of digital transformation these days, the Open movement.
What are the main guests and aspects that will be discussed at the 2016 event?
For this year, we have prepared a conference program that aims to achieve a perfect balance between the participation of renowned international specialists and cases national successes. The aim is for our conference program to be a clear, concise and practical response to the challenges facing Brazilian data center professionals today. We highlight the participation of Raj Vohra, Global Infrastructure, Google; from Harmail Chatha, Director, Global Data Center Operations, Groupon; or of cases success of companies such as Sky, Brazilian Army, BRF Brasil and SABESP. We will bring together more than 90 national and international speakers. It will be a two-day event fully dedicated to best practices in the areas of design, construction, cloud, colocation, cabling, servers, software and cybersecurity in the data center.
How many data centers are there today, approximately, in Brazil? What have you accomplished in recent years?
Brazil represents practically half of the entire data center market in Latin America (more than 40% of the total). Even with the political and economic challenges experienced in the last two years, the country shows its resilience with good opportunities for growth. I highlight mainly service providers, such as Angola Cables, which is developing a large project in Fortaleza (CE) and which will provide service to the Monet submarine cable; Ascenty, which has invested heavily in the country, with a forecast of five new data centers by 2017; Equinix, in strong expansion; Odata, a new player entering the market with high expectations; Google, SAP and Oracle, which also announced data center projects in Brazil. All of them are a sample of the strength that a market with more than 200 million inhabitants has.
In view of the growing adoption of cloud computing and SaaS, how should companies in the sector prepare to meet this demand?
The debate over which cloud modality is most successful is over. Hybrid cloud won. The multi-cloud proposal, mixing Iaas/Paas (Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service, respectively), is the clear winner. In fact, the advantages of this proposal are quite obvious. The deployment of various infrastructures and cloud platforms offer companies great flexibility, agility and ease in decision making. But are they all just advantages? Of course not. The whole multi-cloud orchestration and management process, for example, is almost always an issue for the IT department. While the future for everyone, or almost everyone, is going to be multi-cloud, there are some questions that need answers. They are: How can IT leaders overcome the challenges associated with managing workloads in a multi-cloud environment? How to ensure good management of SLAs? I think that the success of companies in the sector lies in their ability to respond to these questions. Finally, we must not forget that, in Brazil, the concern with data security is still the major obstacle in the process of adopting Cloud Computing. Thus, perhaps it is not unreasonable to think that the more security you have, the greater your success.
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