IDC predicts that 21% of Malaysia’s GDP is expected to be digitised by 2022. This means that growth in every industry will be boosted by digitally enabled offerings, operations and relationships. As Malaysia continues to prove to be an excellent hub for data centres in the region, they need to keep up with the latest technology in data centres as well. Investing in the right type of technology is key to ensure data centres remain agile and efficient.

So what are the innovations where Malaysian data centres are investing in?

Firstly, which is also probably the biggest innovation all data centres are investing in, is Artificial Intelligence. AI is proving to be the future of almost every piece of technology. There’s no reason why Malaysian data centres shouldn’t invest in AI as well. Across the globe, AI is influencing the way data centres are designed and developed.

Gartner analysts predict that by 2020, more than 30% of data centres that fail to implement AI, will cease to be operationally and economically viable. Why so?

Over the years, Malaysian organisations have invested heavily in data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) technologies to better monitor and manage their critical IT systems. But an important step towards fully realising the nation’s Industry 4.0 aspirations is by embracing next-gen technologies, intelligent systems and robotics. In order to do that, DCIM systems, among others, will have to become AI-enabled.

Intelligent data centres with AI will become more energy efficient. At the same time, AI-based deep learning in self-managing data centres can help with applications to predict problems ahead of time. The predictive analysis can help data centres in terms of workload distribution as it is able to learn from past data and run load distribution more efficiently.

Secondly, data centres will be looking at the core of cloud computing technology. Hybrid cloud is enabling enterprises to use the cloud as an extension of their existing data centres while reducing risks and controlling costs. In other words, a hybrid cloud can offer the most benefits by connecting off- and on-premise resources. Data centres leveraging on this can achieve a lot indeed. According to IDC in their top 10 ICT predictions for Malaysia, by 2022, 90% of Malaysia 100 (M100) organisations will mitigate lock-in through multi-cloud or hybrid technologies and tools.

Thirdly, Malaysian data centres will be looking into hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). As data protection requirements increase, the demand for HCI solutions across the globe grows as well. The global HCI market size is expected to grow to US$17.1 billion by 2023.

HCI really is a transformative data centre technology. Deployment is super quick with no need for downtime, an imperative when building out cloud infrastructure. By combining compute, storage and networking hardware into a platform that has a software-defined layer on top, it becomes possible to manage the entire stack at scale by smaller teams with less ongoing training requirements. Also important is the TCO that HCI provides. It delivers scalability and performance built on commodity x86 architecture. At the same time, by easily sharing these resources across applications, HCI can deliver incredible resource utilisation efficiencies.

To learn more about these innovations, W.Media hosts Cloud and Datacenter Conventions around Southeast Asia throughout the year. On 11^th April 2019, W.Media will be hosting the Cloud and Datacenter Convention 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference will be an all-inclusive event where end-users, operators, system integrators, consultants & engineers are able to meet and connect. The convention will highlight key progress, best practices, concerns and future of cloud and data centre innovations, featuring various international speakers from the industry.