Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A +
DAVID CRAIG,
CEO, ICEOTOPE
EDITOR’S QUESTION
Digital Transformation is creating a
roadmap for divergent requirements
in data centres that no longer
conform to the historic ‘one design suits all’.
Customers are now more knowledgeable
about specific approaches to data
management, whether that is the HPC,
streaming low latency content, or general
enterprise access requirements - the data
infrastructure provided must help them add
value to their results.
Gartner predicts that public cloud services
will grow to a US$368 billion market by
2022, and that all major countries will
experience between 15% and 33% growth.
This can only serve to drive colocation
expansion and that will develop the
regional cores that service a multitude of
Edge deployments.
For most corporations, hybrid IT has become
mainstream and future IT infrastructures
will be multi-cloud based. Applications and
workloads will be located where they have
the best fit and can deliver the best possible
business outcomes.
Western Europe has a highly developed
colocation market and deregulated
telecom infrastructure, which provided for
fast expansion, but must also cope with
compliance requirements from individual
countries, for which localised data centres
and Edge facilities can provide the solution.
This explosion in data generation and the
expansion in infrastructure deployed requires
data centre providers to take the lead on
facilities design and HVAC and become more
transparent and open-minded to tailored
offerings to their customers.
The Uptime Institute recently stated that,
average data centre PUE in 2020 is 1.58.
This has not significantly improved in the last
seven years. Many data centre developers
are still wedded to a chilled air-cooled
approach to technology spaces, which rolls
out the older style fan-assisted servers. This
legacy approach consumes large amounts
“
THIS EXPLOSION
IN DATA
GENERATION
AND THE
EXPANSION IN
INFRASTRUCTURE
DEPLOYED
REQUIRES
DATA CENTRE
PROVIDERS TO
TAKE THE LEAD ON
FACILITIES DESIGN
AND HVAC.
of water and up to 30% of data centre’s
energy in cooling, while restricting the
server capability at a time when greatly
increased data throughput is expected. A
more enlightened approach, whether in data
centres or at the Edge, is sealed chassis-level
immersive liquid cooling technology, which
has a significantly lower PUE at 1.03.
Liquid cooling is 1,000 times more efficient
than air cooling and eliminates the
requirement for refrigerants. It removes
the need for server fans while dramatically
increasing the compute density that can be
effectively managed in each server rack.
Digital transition and the requirement for
IoT and 5G networks in local environments
will situate more data centre capacity
at the Edge. The current IT equipment
manufacturers’ approach to repackaging
fan-reliant servers demonstrates that data
centre operators need to take a step back
and ask – what is the most effective and
sustainable design for this site?
Data centres compete for space and
resources with people, but hide in out of the
way locations. Building out the Edge will place
them among us and they therefore must be
as efficient and non-intrusive as possible.
www.intelligentcio.com
INTELLIGENTCIO
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