Ahead of the release of DCD>Asia-Pacific | Edge to Cloud, industry thought leader Yuval Bachar sat down with DCD's Nick Parfitt to discuss his latest venture and the increasing digital infrastructure divide in Asia-Pacific and beyond.
Yuval's A-list career includes Microsoft's Azure Platform, LinkedIn, the Open19 Project Foundation, Facebook, the Data Center Group at Cisco, and Juniper Networks. But his new start-up, ECL, has allowed him to build on his range of perspectives in order to ‘democratize’ the data center industry.
When asked about his new venture and the drivers behind it, Yuval stated that he sees the industry as very divided. On one hand, there are global cloud players who operate data centers that are “top-notch, high availability, high sustainability and geared to unlimited growth.” On the other, there are a huge number of "other" facilities - both collocated and private - where Yuval sees a difference “like jumping off a cliff." He notes that these facilities "are not able to sustain efficiency, reliability or sustainability in the same way and they have been built pretty much the same way for 25 years.”
This division does not have good consequences for the industry. According to Yuval, it makes it far more difficult to achieve an effective hybrid IT approach and pushes enterprise very much towards cloud and towards a situation of monopoly, stating: “The demand is growing too big to be fulfilled at a reasonable price and that is starting to affect the [enterprise] bottom line. It’s OK if you launch a couple of VMs but it gets out of hand if you need to launch 10,000 which is what has been happening over the past 18 months to many enterprise customers."
As the industry pushes towards levels of investment beyond US$200 billion this decade, there are further complications for enterprise. Edge will push processing closer to the source and the consumers of data, and this will create issues for data centers and networks, especially in the Asia Pacific - a geographically large region with dispersed populations and variable levels of economic and technological maturity. Yuval sees this situation as compounded by limited available space in many core hubs, such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, “even here in the middle of Silicon Valley, you’re not going to be able to buy up 10 acres to put in a data center or get 10MW of power allocated to you in some cities.”
So, what will be the solution for an industry needing to balance demand growth against continuing requirements for resilience, efficiency and cost?
Tune into Yuval's new episode of DCD>Asia Pacific | Edge to Cloud, broadcasting at 9am SST (UTC+8) on September 15th. In the free-to-view broadcast, Yuval will take you through some of the future options for housing enterprise workloads that he has developed. He promises that “this will do for data centers what Elon Musk did for the automotive industry”.
To stream Yuval's episode, subscribe to stream DCD>Asia-Pacific | Edge to Cloud using the form below: