A first class programme of speakers is coming to Data Centre World, Singapore 11-12 October 2017! These will include Harmail Chatha, Global Data Enterprise Data Centre Operations & Architecture, Groupon.

Harmail is an accomplished senior level technical operational leader who has a proven track record of pioneering and implementing high-growth, optimised and efficient projects, programs and technical directives across large-scale global environments, through innovative, strategic and tactical development of technical solutions that drive ROI, cost savings, and productivity. He will be speaking at the session entitled 'Transition: Cloud to Colo' which will look at what organisations think they need and what they actually need in this field.

Harmail says that depending on the scale, cost can be a huge differentiator between cloud and colocation data centres. ?Data centres also offer the ability to switch the cost model from purely opex to capex. In addition, data centres provide better performance for latency sensitive applications, because the organisation has end to end control of their infrastructure so that they can control performance, reliability and overall user experience.?

Part of good data centre operation requires the operator to keep one step ahead, especially when it comes to providing value. ?Data centre operators need to understand how to continual improve and maximise the data centre value chain,? explains Harmail. There are other considerations for operators to consider with respect to learning and knowledge: ?Granular level of understanding of power, cooling, identification and remediation of single point of failures,? says Harmail. ?Thereafter how to maximise utilisation, so that the business is not leaving money on the table.?

Reflecting on the last year in the data centre sector, Harmail comments: ?We are starting to see organisations embrace and make the shift to high density rack models. The legacy threshold for a long time has been on average 5kw per rack - then we saw an increase to 9kw, but now web-scale organisations are pushing racks densities upwards of 20+kw per rack.?

?In addition, organisations are understanding and starting to architect their data centre environments for edge-computing. Placing the content, compute and resources at the end of the network, closest to the sources and sinks of this data.?

So what does the rest of 2017 have in store for the data centre sector?

?Data centre architecture will go beyond the traditional approach of just focusing energy efficiencies but rather holistically improving and customising all hardware components for servers, storage and networking,? says Harmail. ?Ultimately, these systems with be run in unison with highly customised software that provides flexibility, resiliency and self-healing to decrease the failure recovery time and impact.?