Deep Love News: The Data Center of the Future

Currently, most new data centers are operating at maximum availability, and their infrastructure energy efficiency is close to their theoretical design goals. However, despite the progress made in these areas, changes in the data center industry will continue and may accelerate. We recommend that senior management of corporate organizations refer to and learn from the analysis of relevant changes and disruptive forces in the data center industry in the next decade introduced in this article to help your company cope with the current demand for digital services and the demands brought about by the continuous increase in new technologies and innovations. Below, we will introduce you to:

• New data center types of the future.
• Related to specific use cases.
• Future-proof your existing data centers to prevent downtime disruptions.

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With most new data centers now operating at peak availability and infrastructure energy efficiency close to theoretical design targets, one might think that the two biggest technical challenges facing the data center industry over the past 30 years have been solved.

But in fact, despite the progress made in these areas, the pace of change in the data center industry will continue and is likely to accelerate in the next decade and beyond. This is due to the increased demand for digital services and the adoption of emerging technologies and innovations by current enterprise organizations, which have mitigated various interference factors. At the same time, enterprises also need to meet increasingly stringent business parameters and service levels.

The combination of business and technology drivers will likely lead to the emergence of new data center facility types. These emerging data center types will share some characteristics with existing data center facilities, while also being specifically tailored for new use cases. For example, we anticipate that future enterprises will require new edge data center capacity to aggregate, process, store, and analyze data from Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures.

In this article, we will work with our readers to analyze and examine the relevant changes and disruptive forces in the data center industry in the next decade, predict new data center types and specific use cases, and finally propose effective ways to prevent downtime and leverage innovation in future-oriented data centers.

New data center form factors (both large and small) and architectural requirements are emerging, driven by a combination of changing fundamental forces and specific technology trends.

The relative number and distribution of existing data center types is already changing due to the influence of cloud service providers and the trend of enterprises moving towards hybrid IT. The growth of edge demand will also be an important driver of new capacity and form factors in the long term.

Specialized data centers (providing specific applications and services) will coexist with some general-purpose facilities (primarily enterprise sites), but will eventually replace the latter. In addition, we expect greater standardization and industrialization of data center design and construction, allowing for more modular capacity expansion.

General purpose disruptive technologies, such as post-silicon technologies and quantum computing, are also likely to result in significant changes in data center design and operations and could render existing data center designs, business models, and services obsolete over the longer term.

Enterprising operators will seek to future-proof new and existing physical data center infrastructure to minimize downtime disruption and maximize the effectiveness of capital expenditures. Increased agility will enable them to take full advantage of innovation and emerging technologies.

Technical Discussion

According to data center monitoring by market research firm 451 Research, there are currently more than 4 million data centers worldwide. These data centers range from server racks and computer rooms owned by small businesses (the form of the vast majority of data center sites today) to commercial multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs) and hyperscale data center sites. Some dynamic changes in the industry have had varying degrees of impact on the distribution and relative number of data centers of these different facility types. In 2015, approximately 80% of the world's data center space (by square feet) was owned by enterprises. However, by 2020, this proportion is expected to fall below 75%. The main reason for this shift is that certain workloads are gradually migrating from enterprise-owned data center sites to cloud services and hosting facilities, which are generally more cost-effective.

The industry trend toward a hybrid IT model is expected to continue, leading enterprises to consolidate data center sites and move into larger sites with fewer facilities. Cloud services and colocation space will increasingly be viewed by enterprise customers as an extension (or replacement) for their own on-premises capacity. Public cloud and other cloud service providers are also driving huge demand for large amounts of colocation space. The trend away from general enterprise sites and toward efficient hosting and cloud facilities is expected to continue and accelerate. However, there will still be demand for dedicated, high-end enterprise sites in some enterprise organizations. New edge micro data centers will also replace "traditional edge" enterprise server racks and computer rooms to a certain extent and support new use cases.

Fundamental drivers and technology trends

Changes in data center design and operations are driven in part by fundamental forces. These fundamental forces, in turn, are driving specific emerging technology trends, some of which have already begun to impact the construction and operation of new data center facilities. So-called “wild cards”—technologies that are theoretically very disruptive and difficult to predict, such as post-silicon technologies and quantum computing—may also lead to significant changes in data center design and operations. It is expected that these forces and specific technologies will give rise to new categories of infrastructure over the next decade that will leverage innovative technologies while also becoming increasingly tailored to specific business needs.

The power of change

Demand - Even after accounting for incremental IT innovation, data center space, power consumption, and bandwidth may struggle to keep up with the projected global demand for IT services over the next two decades. A lot of new capacity will be needed in the future, but existing data center sites may also need to take on some of the burden. This would be a major challenge if enterprise data centers were fully utilized, but most current data centers still operate at very low IT utilization levels and are over-provisioned for both power and cooling. Therefore, in addition to tapping into new data center capacity, there is a major opportunity to improve utilization, migrate workloads (on-premises deployment), and optimize the efficiency of existing data center sites.

• Cost transparency - Hosting and service providers are leading the way in technology investments to provide greater transparency (e.g., power usage and IT capacity), showbacks, and real-time cost accounting. Given greater visibility into real costs (which may be dynamically changing), using these tools will help enterprise data centers better understand and make decisions about where to perform escalation, the level of availability required, latency, proximity, performance, and services. This can lead to more real-time and dynamic decision-making.
• Convergence – Progress on convergence has been slow. But there are signs that the typically separate IT and facilities (equipment and staff) are becoming more converged. This should help enable a more holistic approach to data center design and facility management, coupled with IT workflow optimization. For example, the possibility of providing “virtual power” by consolidating and moving workloads using software and intelligent power devices is becoming more realistic. Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software tools can also help provide a holistic view of IT and facility operations. Prefabricated modular (PFM) data center designs, including micro data centers, will also bring IT and facility infrastructure closer together.
• Industrialization (and standardization) - The data center industry is huge and is becoming more industrialized. For example, an entire PFM data center can be built in a factory. In the coming years, the sheer size of the global data center market is likely to result in vendors producing or pre-configuring a vast catalog of equipment and designs, each optimized for customer-specific requirements and applications.
• Research and Development – ​​Scientific research is imperative, but sometimes without a clear business case, and will also impact the design and operation of future data centers. Many emerging technologies are likely to have a significant impact on the economics of running a data center. These technologies include quantum computing, silicon photonics, memristors, and high-speed, high-bandwidth networks including 5G.

Specific technology trends

The broader forces of change in the data center industry are closely tied to a set of specific technologies and trends that are reshaping the design and operation of new data center capacity.

• Hyperscale Cloud (driving efficiencies and innovation) – Data center operators in the enterprise and colocation industries are under increasing pressure to match the efficiency and cost optimization of hyperscale operators such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Cloud service operators are able to leverage economies of scale and advances in IT infrastructure (compute, storage, networking) to drive virtualization and utilization, and test and apply innovations in data center architectures. Some competitor operators will have to seriously consider whether it makes sense to invest in winning the competition, or whether a collaborative strategy is more prudent in the long run.
• PFM design - Prefabricated modular data centers are assembled using one or more structural building blocks, assembled and tested in a factory environment, and then delivered for final on-site integration. Forward-thinking data center operators who have adopted this approach will enjoy the competitive advantages that PFM data center construction brings: standardization, compressed schedules, tighter budget control, lower risk, and better alignment with business goals.
• Software and data driven – More and more data centers are being controlled by software to improve utilization, availability, resiliency and flexibility. Despite early concerns about data center infrastructure management software implementation and its return on investment, DCIM has begun to be seen as an integral component of software-defined infrastructure. The recent development of cloud-based data center management as a service (DMaaS) is expected to increase the value of DCIM data when it is aggregated and analyzed at scale. This may eventually allow data-driven, real-time autonomous management of data centers using large data sets (perhaps with very few or no on-site staff).
• Smart Energy Trading - Data centers have made significant progress in improving energy efficiency and power usage effectiveness (PUE). However, the next stage in this process is to link energy use to demand and better control the supply of energy. This may involve smart procurement and sales of energy: including greater use of demand response, and managing IT energy consumption through greater use of power management and power limiting.
• Connectivity - The rise of public cloud services has put increasing pressure on enterprises and MTDC providers, but it has also provided new opportunities for the connection and integration of public clouds with private clouds and non-cloud services. As a result, interconnectivity (enterprises directly connected to cloud providers, partners, carrier networks, etc.) is becoming an increasingly important service. By replicating processes and data on a network of facilities spread across regions and between regions, application and data resiliency, including disaster recovery, can be achieved at the network and software level in many cases.
• Open Architecture (Open Compute Project / Open 19) - The Open Compute Project (OCP) has not had a significant impact yet (outside of the hyperscalers), but as the open ecosystem continues to develop and grow, its long-term impact may be very obvious. Open source hardware and software promises to bring hyperscale design and efficiency to the enterprise and hosting markets, and is disrupting traditional facility architectures, including distributed UPS, alternative rack designs, distributed connectivity, and DC power distribution. The recently launched Open19 specification has a lower entry barrier than OCP in some aspects, and also brings new rack form factors.
• Edge Data Centers – The term “edge computing” covers a range of workload types and use cases, some established and some emerging. Edge demand is expected to be a significant driver for new data center types and form factors, including micro data centers (small sites including prefabricated micro modular sites) as well as new centralized facilities.