FEATURE : DATA CENTRES
processing has become insatiable worldwide , making it more challenging than ever to operate and scale these facilities efficiently .
Finally , staying updated on technological advancements is essential to keep data centres efficient and competitive .
“ Factors such as higher costs , new capacity challenges , and increased regulation due to sustainability concerns about energy and water consumption , will impact growth . The data centre industry is facing increasing pressure to become more sustainable and includes using renewable energy sources and improving cooling systems ,” says CommScope ’ s Kanary .
“ Managing data centres to meet the increasing demands for capacity , performance , and energy efficiency comes with various challenges ,” says Peter Adel , Regional Sales Manager , NETSCOUT .
First , balancing scalability with performance is crucial to allow data centres to expand without impacting speed or reliability .
Second , reducing energy consumption is a significant concern due to environmental and cost factors , requiring complex solutions like advanced cooling systems .
Third , maintaining security and reliability amidst expansion efforts is vital , considering the growing network complexity and cyber threats . Additionally , optimising resource use while scaling up is essential for cost-effectiveness .
Relentless energy consumption
According to Michael Abendanon , Head of MEA at NTT Global Data Centres EMEA , “ Data centre cooling solutions need to be more efficient to support the higher density as most traditionally air-cooled data centres cannot manage the heat being created by new applications and hardware . Cooling solutions in the data centre are already starting to move away from air to water-based , although there will be hybrid solutions in the interim .”
Data centre providers must become more efficient in how they manage the cooling solutions , while also being more creative with their overall building designs due to these higher density environments .
The benefits of newer cooling solutions and designs is that power utilization and Power Usage Effectiveness , PUE can be driven lower , and the physical space needed to run larger data centres will decrease – all of which change the overall economics of running data centres in the long term as more can be done in a smaller footprint .
For a long time , data centres were operated at 5 – 8kW a rack , more recently 8 – 20kW a rack and now a huge step change is seen to over 100kW a rack .
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