Data centres can help change the world for the better, by allowing organisations across all sectors access to cheap intelligence and data modelling.
That's according to Neela Jacques, senior cloud strategist for VMware speaking as part of a panel discussion during the Big Data Iceland event hosted by Risk Management Solutions (RMS) and data centre solutions provider Verne Global.
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"Often when my friends hear me passionately talking about data centre technology, they look at me in a funny way and say ‘why are you so excited about infrastructure?'. I say it's because we have the potential to change the world," he told the audience at the Viking World Museum, just south of Iceland's capital, Reykjavik.
"IT infrastructure was fundamentally too complex. And as a result, there were a whole set of possibilities in the world that weren't coming true," Jacques continued, adding that automated systems can play a huge part in improving businesses from retail to banks and insurance.
"If you could find a way to simplify that technology, if you could find a way to automate computing, the world is the limit in terms of what we can do and what we can deliver," he said.
"For the last 10-plus years VMware has worked on delivering that vision, this idea that if you could abstract all major resources in the data centre, pool them together, if you could automate them, you'd be able to serve a wide range of uses."
Jacques commented that the barrier to these solutions is often their high cost, with hardware, cooling systems and personnel all requiring significant financial resources, particularly the latter, as "people are involved in almost any change that happens in the data centre".
VMware has partnered with RMS in an attempt to discover a way to reduce those costs, with virtualisation of the data centre one of those methods, Jacques said, adding that Iceland's unique position when it comes to power and cooling through the use of geothermal energy and the natural cold climate makes it an excellent spot for a low cost data centre.
Jacques added that RMS is ahead of the trend in what it can offer in terms of scalability in addition to the natural benefits of a data centre based in Iceland.
"I believe they are the front of a trend we're seeing across every company in the industry. Companies are just starting to taste what they can do if they quickly scale up computer systems," he said, suggesting that eventually this scale-up will have a huge impact.
"So I'm very proud to be here, standing with RMS to develop what I think is one of the most cutting edge infrastructures that will eventually directly hit every single one of us," Jacques concluded.
