Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1219491
6 I ICT TODAY COVER ARTICLE By Seán Adam TOMORROW'S MODERN DATA CENTER It is said that the only constant in life is change and few in the ICT industry would disagree that the pace of changes is increasing at a dramatic rate. Hand-in-hand with this pace of change is the ever-increasing consumption of data. Cisco claims that by 2022 cellular data usage will eclipse 77 exabytes per month. That is the number 77 followed by 18 zeroes! However, technology does not drive growth; it simply enables it. It will be the end applications that define the reality of 5G and the infrastructure necessary to support it. Many people already have at least one wearable, such as a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Combine that with smartphones and the beginning of a more connected on-person existence is achieved. Now merge that with surroundings that integrate traffic and security systems in smart cities and smart buildings. Overlay with aug- mented reality, and the digital world and real world merge into one. Dreams of fully autonomous cars prom- ise to transform roadways and, for many people, their greatest singular time investment in a day, their com- mute. Nearer on the horizon will be fleets of drones, delivering everything from packages, to pizza, to drug prescriptions. UPS Flight Forward, a subsidiary of UPS, In part, this will be enabled by emerging technolo- gies, such as 5G and the next generation WiFi 802.11ax standard, also known as Wi-Fi 6. These technologies bring a promise of increased speeds, faster response (i.e., latency), and the reality of true internet of things (IoT). The number of connected devices is expected to exceed 25 billion by 2025. 1 Consider what the transition from 4G to 5G looks like and why this is important to the impact on the data center of tomorrow. Table 1 includes some of the key specifications. The step function improvement in latency and data rates makes more and larger content more easily avail- able. This efficiency in accessing data will be a self-fulfill- ing prophecy driving the need for a massive increase in storage.