Southeast Asia has undergone rapid and unprecedented transformation over the years, driven by a thriving start up scene and the rise of digital-native businesses. At the heart of this expansion lies Singapore's robust data centre infrastructure, growing steadily with a projected five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16 per cent to reach around US$1.9 billion and cross the 700MW threshold this year with its current built-out capacity. A new environment is unfolding in Singapore, especially after the government lifted its moratorium and established new policies and parameters that allow developers meeting the updated criteria to enter the market.
For Singapore to meet the desired standards, newly constructed data centres should strive for a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3 or lower, while also integrating innovative practices that promote efficiency and sustainability. In fact, the government recently introduced new standards permitting data centres to operate at elevated temperatures in order to power the data centres’ cooling systems effectively in high humidity conditions, which is estimated to generate annual savings of S$250,000 through the adoption of this new guidelines.
Already one of the world’s largest data centre hubs and the top data centre market in Asia Pacific, the call to build new data centres with higher green standards will be key to shaping Singapore’s data centre landscape. However, with demand for cloud computing continuing to escalate, organisations not only need to commit towards sustainability goals to meet government regulation standards, but also ensure the next-generation data centre fabric brings significant improvements in scalability, performance, and security.
The modern data centres must-haves: Security and scalability
With the advent and explosion of cloud and virtual machines, data centre fabrics—an interconnected layer of network devices that flattens the network architecture—over the past three decades have transformed, revolutionising the communication pathways and connectivity within the data centre. Despite these gradual evolutions, the older generations of data centre fabrics present us with issues, relying on hierarchical network infrastructures where multiple layers of switches and routers are used to interconnect devices.
Characterised by their centralised security services, older generation data centres come with significant cost considerations when scaling up the network infrastructure to accommodate the growing number of workloads. Older data centre fabrics do not align with the global trend of harnessing distributed data, which requires workloads to be processed closer to the data flowing across many edge locations. By 2027, Gartner predicts that 35 per cent of data centre infrastructure will be managed through a cloud-based control plane, up from less than 10 per cent in 2022, indicating a paradigm shift that draws from a modern distributed architecture approach, one that is edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven.
The latest, or fourth generation, of data centre networking witnessed the shift from centralised to distributed services. This transition brings notable improvements in scalability and performance by distributing security services into the top of each rack, providing enhanced security as the number of workloads expand. The distributed services architecture also enables substantial scaling of telemetry, providing detailed insights into the data centre's performance at a lower cost compared to its predecessor.
Future-proofing with fourth generation data centre fabrics
Fourth generation data centre networking provides superior operation workflow management capabilities through seamless integration and a deep open ecosystem. The ability to combine various network, compute and storage products ensures that IT departments gain a complete outlook of the virtualised environment– essentially providing a view of the lifecycle of a workload. By orchestrating a discrete set of switches as a single networking fabric, day-to-day operations are simplified.
Businesses can take this one step further by using modern fabric automation tools enabling a simple point and click interface to fully configure the underlay and overlay fabrics to greatly reduce complexity. With event-based workflow automation,fourthgeneration data centre networking can support the provision, configuration and optimisation of networks in real-time without the need for intervention, thereby freeing up crucial time for IT teams.
Fourth generation fabrics can be integrated with workflow management and automation tools while layered with hybrid cloud services and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The combination of hybrid cloud services and IaaS offers significant advantages over traditional network-only models, whether deployed on-premises, fully managed in a pay-per-use model at the edge, in colocations, or in the data centre. This means that the latest fabrics can integrate with service now applications. If businesses require a new server or application, everything from security to network can be automated and integrated – providing hyperscale-like operations workflow.
The latest developments in data centres present organisations with a means to future-proof themselves against the backdrop of increasingly distributed data, but also pave the way for the future of Singapore’s data centre landscape. By embracing network infrastructure strategies that integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options, these new data centre fabrics will underpin the shift towards ‘centres of data’ by supporting workloads at scale with simplicity, speed, and security.
