smart cities
Resiliency and reliability
will also be fundamental to safe
24/7 operations. Recent outages
at hospitals have hit headlines,
with operations cancelled or
postponed, and the occasional
outages in some of the major cloud
providers’ operations also cause
big disruptions to a variety of their
corporate customers. The risk of a
connected city going dark would
clearly have big implications for
citizens in their homes, individual
businesses and safety.
Security will clearly be a
concern too. If cities are going to
be run by connected networks,
the security of that network will
be paramount to protect against
malicious attacks, hacks and
takeovers. Adding many more
access points to a network creates
a security threat, which those
intent on creating large bot-nets
have already taken advantage
of using home Wi-Fi routers,
IP security cameras and digital
video recorders. Operators of
critical networks and essential
infrastructure within an ecosystem,
including data centre operators
as the guardians of the physical
aspects of security, will need to
work together to provide the best
cyber security possible.
38 | April 2017
Data centres as
a part of the fabric
of the smart city
As major consumers of power
themselves, the data centre will
need to conform to the energy
efficient, smart energy ethos of the
smart city. Achieving a low power
usage effectiveness (PUE) has long
been a mark of a well designed
data centre, but it will be critical
to walk the walk within a smart
city. As businesses with experience
of energy management systems,
there could even be scope for
outsourcing of this knowledge to
others within the ecosystem.
Data centres even have the key
to unlock one of the challenges
to operating a smart city; power
generation. Data centres all have
redundant generators within their
infrastructure which are maintained
and tested so that if there was a grid
outage, the generators would keep
the lights on until the grid came
back on. For the vast majority of the
time though, these valuable assets
sit idle. Some operators are already
in discussions with the grid to sell
power back to the grid at peak times
using their own generators. In a city
with a smart energy monitoring
system which could manage power
inputs from multiple sources
Data centres will
need to conform
to the energy
efficient, smart
energy ethos of
the smart city.
and direct power to where it was
needed and when it was needed,
data centres can become both the
consumer and the producer.
To truly embrace the ethos of
energy and waste management,
data centres need to look to their
own waste; heat. The Scandinavian
countries put the rest of Europe to
shame with their heat exchange
systems, where waste heat from a
data centre is used to heat houses,
businesses and water. Working
examples like this in the UK are few
and far between, but this would be
the end result of a truly smart city.
Power to the
data centre!
As the boundaries between our
physical and digital lives blur, our
realities become augmented and we
rely increasingly on the power of the
‘smart everything’ to optimise our
lives, there is no doubt that the data
centre will play a fundamental role in
our towns and economies. The size
and design of the data centre may
need to change to accommodate
advances in processing capacity,
power consumption and federated
vs hyperscale models – but there
is no chance that a smart city will
exist without one.