As expectations grow from data centres due to pandemic-driven digitalisation and transformation , bridging the vast number of subsystems is the way forward to make them future ready , says Sayaaji Shinde , Global Business Director – Smart Cities and Infrastructure at AVEVA .
s traffic on the Internet grows and enterprises
A continue to digitalise , the infrastructure required to support the transition – from offline to online , on-premises to the cloud – must advance as well . While it is well known that the energy required for tomorrow ’ s data centre is likely to match that of a medium sized city , there are also other looming challenges giving tech chiefs sleepless nights .
A modern-day data centre consists of many subsystems . The simultaneous usage of power distribution , water systems , emergency backup , communications , security and surveillance , and multiple other support systems , creates added complexity .
For effective performance and cost management , these subsystems must talk and work in concert with each other .
The pandemic brought about a global realisation that the online world is real , viable and the way forward for tomorrow . With the emphasis shifting to the virtual world , from online collaboration , trade and commerce to online supply chains and routing , data centre customers are becoming more demanding in their expectations .
They want 100 % availability and no downtime . They expect to be able to get serviced on demand and to be able to pay as they go . Increasing performance and efficiency , with reducing costs , are key expectations from advanced data centres . In theory , modern-day data centres are built with digital technologies , so these evolving expectations are not unsupported .
But while compute infrastructures and overlaying applications like cloud platforms have innovated to become elastic , data centres are not there as yet .
There are at least three principal data centre challenges that can be rectified by having a unified integrated management
system , bridging the industrial and digital side of operations effectively .
1 . Downtime and outage
Downtime of a data centre or parts of it can prove to be very damaging for customers . A recent global survey of 1,500 + data centre customers found that 34 % experienced downtime with an average cost of US $ 1 million .
One of the primary reasons for this is the lack of asset management tools that do not allow predictive maintenance models to be built up .
Data centre administrators are unable to allocate resources or execute preemptive maintenance because they lack
Sayaaji Shinde , Global Business Director – Smart Cities and Infrastructure at AVEVA
Building the data centre of the future
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