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ICT Today April/May/June 2020

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28 I ICT TODAY It is important to keep in mind the TIA standards and BICSI best practices for traditional data centers throughout the further exploration herein of EDCs, especially in light of AFCOM's dispute with research firms, such as Gartner. 3 Gartner proclaims that the traditional data center is dead and that "by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data center, versus 10% today." 4 Clearly, differing opinions and a host of varying predictions can perplex even the best data center designers, installers, and data center operators. Determining what drives the need for an EDC and why the enterprise customer may need one is a good start to a better understanding of EDCs while mitigating some perplexities. DATA, DEVICES, IOT AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Many people have come to accept this, but can the ICT industry expect this to still be true as technology evolves? Various market projections forecast that there will be between 25 and 50 billion connected devices by 2022, creating mass amounts of data to be processed, transported, and stored. Devices today already collect more information than most enterprise managers and data center operators know how to use. However, the devices that collect the data do. The amount of data, the amount of devices and the amount of data that the devices collect continues to increase at a rapid rate. They collect data that data center operators never thought needed collecting. Some of these devices act as peripheral devices with IoT that have one smart device feeding or monitoring many other devices that communicate or process data essentially as a sub- network. Advancements in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), virtual reality (VR), aug- mented reality (AR), information awareness (e.g., health vitals), and other content enable the collection of end- less amounts of data. Enterprise managers are finding ways to utilize "newly able to be collected" data to pre- dict required responses or to drive other tasks. Soon, everything that counts will be able to be counted, and everything that can be counted will eventually count. DEFINING LATENCY All data may be important, but do they each require different response times to process and enable the next action? Some data has an expiration date. With so much continuous data being collected, current data expires almost instantaneously. This drives the need for ultrafast reaction time for some process requests. This reaction time is dependent on another aforementioned buzzword, latency. Dictionary.com defines latency as "The time required online or in a network for the one-way or round- trip transfer of data between two nodes." Verizon defines it slightly differently as "The time it takes for data to travel from one user, over the network to the central processor and back again." The mere mention of latency drives people to want the lowest possible latency, but is it always needed, practical, or affordable for the given task? Many in the ICT industry often hear that 5G will be the solution for networking problems. While there will be increased bandwidth and speeds with 5G, they are not directly related to improved latency as many assume. In fact, even with 5G, latency will become the new bottleneck to the development of apps and other process functions. Many people in the ICT industry believe that there will be more and more EDCs located at the base of cellular towers and other 5G aggregation points. Crown Castle's CEO, Jay Brown, tells another story, "At this point, I really don't see data centers playing a signifi- cant role in our long-term strategy. We think the opportu- nity for us really relies around towers and then the use of fiber for small cells." Crown Castle is the largest cell tower owner and developer, owning and operating approxi- mately 40,000 cell towers in North America and providing While there will be increased bandwidth and speeds with 5G, they are not directly related to improved latency as many assume.

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