The anticipation of 5G in India has been building up for years now. In India, 5G first came into the conversation in 2017 when a high-level forum was set up by the Telecom Ministry to chalk out a roadmap towards a 5G India by 2024.
As per latest developments, the 5G spectrum auctions are expected to be held in February 2022. Naturally, the country needs to build a favourable 5G ecosystem; this also indicates that there would be substantial changes to be made in data center infrastructure resulting in humongous expenditure. Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution will help reduce the expenditure cost while improving productivity and efficiency of data centers
As 5G will greatly speed up the data transmission process for technologies such as AI, AR, VR, and new content formats, there will be an increased need to upgrade the data infrastructure capacity to support mass transmissions. This is because edge applications will need advanced computing power, expanded storage, and nifty connectivity equipment to handle larger and faster data transmission.
To support these needs, the data centers will require significant changes as the prime impact of 5G will be on core data center infrastructure and will be centred around optimizing efficiency, reliability, resiliency, and security while meeting increased data and network demands. While the whole industry is making a buzz about 5G’s final advent and due to the ever-increasing complexity of data center environments, DCIM software will be a favourable tool to have reliable and more advanced management.
DCIM is looked upon as a standard tool for data center management. Organizations and service providers need DCIM to manage all physical, virtual and logical data center assets, quickly plan and provision new equipment and changes, improve data center design, increase operational efficiency, and plan the capacity for future growth while increasing utilization of existing assets. The proliferation of 5G will, undoubtedly, stimulate the need to manage huge amounts of data and will have a direct impact on data centers as there will be increased capacity requirements.
All the demands arising from use of 5G technology can be fulfilled by the application of DCIM solutions, as they greatly affect the processing, moving and storing of data. Basically DCIM solutions help upgrade the traditional data center to a more modular, scalable and flexible design as they require modular facilities to accommodate the scalable data growth. Data centers play a major role in enforcing standard processes for operating the data centers that helps reduce operator errors, which can account for as much as 80 percent of system outages, among other benefits:
Access to accurate, actionable data about the current state and future needs of the data center and standard procedures for equipment changes along with asset management
Better predictability for space, power and cooling capacity and enhanced understanding of the present state of the power and cooling infrastructure and environment increases the overall availability of the data center.
Automates visual documentation by providing full 3D specifications of assets with high-fidelity front and back images, exact U position and dimensional, weight and data, and power port information.
The launch of 5G is expected to propel the growth of the DCIM market. DCIM is the fastest, easiest and complete data center management solution that bridges organizational domains and helps maintain uptime, drive efficiency, and boost productivity. With these functions DCIM also bridges information across organizational silos. DCIM is the solution that completes the toolkit to have the visibility and information needed to properly plan and deploy equipment for data center projects to support businesses/IT services.
For the foreseeable future, the extreme dynamics of 5G will remain complex. The need to navigate this fluid, interlinked web of dependencies is not going to pass. There will be huge volumes of data, long-haul networks would be challenged to carry these increased data volumes. DCIM will help in better management of the growing data and also accommodate the data in the available data center setups to a certain extent, reducing the cost of expanding the data centers.
Shailendra Trivedi, senior Director Sales Public – Networks
R&M India
