Hyperscale White Paper

Executive Summary:

The growth of cloud IT adoption continues unabated. Today's landscape of cloud providers is dominated by a small handful of companies based in the United States and China that deploy company owned hyperscale data centers. For the foreseeable future, these few will account for much of the growth to come in the cloud IT market, as many businesses decide to give up owning their own data centers and migrate their applications to cloud platforms. By 2020, 47% of all servers sold are expected to go to hyperscale customers. For legacy hardware providers, such as HPE and Dell, this trend portends a narrower customer base having both a higher technical acumen and a closer attention to the bottom line. HPE and Dell will see their sales to hyperscale customers increasingly captured by “no name" white box vendors who cater to giving their customers exactly what they want and no more. One server configuration no longer fits all. Open Computing is increasingly talked about as a path to lower costs and higher efficiencies. New topologies in networking yield higher bandwidth for both “north-south" and “east-west" traffic in the hyperscale data center. Facebook has open sourced the specifications for their commodity-based switch designs and shown to the world the many benefits of software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). For the hyperscale data center operators, innovations in power delivery and new approaches to cooling enable the rack power density within the hyperscale data center to increase while improving the efficiency of the overall infrastructure, resulting in extremely low PUE. This white paper discusses what comprises a typical hyperscale data center and the role that power infrastructure plays in enabling these data centers to operate as reliably and efficiently as possible.