Network Communications News (NCN) August 2016 | Page 25

IT load

F E AT U R E

How low can you go?
Traditional data centres are designed for a low PUE rating, but Kevin Brown of
Schneider Electric questions whether the impact of the IT load is more important.

A

s Internet based computing
evolves, the data centres that
house much of the processing
power and data storage will
become increasingly important.
With an increase for service
and computing power,
the infrastructure will also become
increasingly varied in size and makeup to support the diversification of IT
services. This, in turn, will create new
requirements for data centres that
cannot be realised through a ‘one size
fits all’ approach.
One consequence is that energy
management will become a more
complex problem. Among the variables
affecting the energy performance of a
data centre are its size, layout, utilisation
density, type of cooling infrastructure
employed, the type of IT deployed and
local climate.
As multiple data centres become
more diverse in engineering terms,

and come to be distributed across a
variety of geographies with varying
climates, managing all of these variables
to optimise the energy consumption
and efficiency of each data centre will
become a greater challenge.
The trend of data centres
becoming more widely distributed
geographically is a feature of edge
computing: the evolution of data
centres away from massive hubs at the
centre of a global network, to smaller
regionally based installations ever
closer to the users of the data and
applications housed within them.
Among the trends driving this change
are the emergence of the Internet of
Things (IoT), in which embedded sensor
driven network connectivity will connect
all manner of physical devices. These
range from buildings to automobiles and
all manner of smart devices, collecting
information to enable better business
decision making.

The growth of data intensive
multimedia applications such as
video on demand is also a key
driver, accompanied by the growth
in high definition TV services, which
requires efficient management of high
bandwidth networks at a regional as
well as global level. Delivery of digital
HDTV and video on demand requires
service providers to locate their
server farms close to their customers.
Therefore viewers in London or
Glasgow downloading the latest movie
blockbuster to their TVs are likely to
have a smoother, glitch free experience
if the server farm is located in the UK
rather than California.
Lastly, the increasing demand
for computing services in specialist
applications such as mining and fossil
fuel extraction, which typically takes
place in remote or hostile environments,
is driving the need for ruggedised
computing applications.
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02/08/2016 12:06