To ask how 5G will affect life inside the data center is analogous to asking how a city would stand up to a natural disaster. The answer is, it depends — on the city and the storm. Make no mistake, 5G will most definitely alter how data centers are designed and, in some cases, will change the role they play in the larger network. By some estimates, data centers will be spending over half their operating budget to support 5G by 2025. The $64,000 question is, where will the money be spent and for what? To be more specific in answering that means digging a bit deeper, so … grab your shovel.
Let’s start with what we know. From a technical perspective, 5G will have several defining characteristics. Most obvious is the use of the 5G new radio (NR) air interface that will exploit new spectrum and provide latency capabilities in the single-digit millisecond range. The enhanced performance will drive deployment of billions of edge-based connected devices and create the need for flexible user-centric networks. To deal with the crush of new data, networks will rely heavily on virtualized architectures like network slicing, and other cloud-based technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-type learning.