K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
In the drive to reduce costs and fund growth, the tide could be turning on blockchain and crypto: Garter predicts that 20% of large organisations will have adopted digital currencies for payments, stored value and the like in less than three years.
Most organisations will not need to develop their own customised blockchain application stack because many large financial services and digital-asset firms have already done the heavy lifting. But what about data management?
Daniel Bizo, research director for Uptime Institute Intelligence, says that energy-intensive crypto and digital currency networks typically do not run in “normal” datacentres, requiring special hardware at the node for economic viability.
The “immediate global problem” is power use, which remains difficult to track and attribute.
For crypto, the energy gap to fiat currencies is still “vast, up to five orders of magnitude”, says Bizo.
This might entail changes in power capacity, cooling infrastructure, equipment form factors and serviceability in facilities, compared with mainstream IT infrastructure. Those differences could indeed be large enough to create operational challenges for facility operations staff, says Bizo.
So what’s driving the shift? Gartner says blockchain and digital currencies retain theoretical appeal among chief financial officers. The hope is for lower costs, faster transaction processing, continuous accounting and auditing, as well as global reach in a low-error environment.
Continue reading: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Cracking-the-code-on-blockchain-and-crypto-What-might-adoption-mean-for-datacentres
Most organisations will not need to develop their own customised blockchain application stack because many large financial services and digital-asset firms have already done the heavy lifting. But what about data management?
Daniel Bizo, research director for Uptime Institute Intelligence, says that energy-intensive crypto and digital currency networks typically do not run in “normal” datacentres, requiring special hardware at the node for economic viability.
The “immediate global problem” is power use, which remains difficult to track and attribute.
For crypto, the energy gap to fiat currencies is still “vast, up to five orders of magnitude”, says Bizo.
This might entail changes in power capacity, cooling infrastructure, equipment form factors and serviceability in facilities, compared with mainstream IT infrastructure. Those differences could indeed be large enough to create operational challenges for facility operations staff, says Bizo.
So what’s driving the shift? Gartner says blockchain and digital currencies retain theoretical appeal among chief financial officers. The hope is for lower costs, faster transaction processing, continuous accounting and auditing, as well as global reach in a low-error environment.
Continue reading: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Cracking-the-code-on-blockchain-and-crypto-What-might-adoption-mean-for-datacentres
