INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Planning for Middle East data
centres of tomorrow
Data volumes globally are expected to increase from the 40
zettabytes recorded in 2019 to 180 zettabytes by 2025. Sanjay
Kumar Sainani, SVP and CTO of Huawei Global Data Centre
Facility Business, explains how data centres can be prepared to
meet this future demand.
Data is an increasingly important
commodity in the new economy.
Data networks are becoming
more essential as nations seek deeper
co-operation and businesses seek more
collaboration especially during the current
testing times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data volumes globally are expected to
increase from the 40 zettabytes recorded
in 2019 to 180 zettabytes by 2025 –
representing growth of more than 400%.
Data centres will be at the heart of this
boom. Ensuring data centres are fully
prepared to meet the future demand is a
critical endeavour to support the new
digital economy.
Sanjay Kumar Sainani, SVP and CTO of
Huawei Global Data Centre Facility Business
Long-term sustainability
considerable heat and usage of highdensity
ICT infrastructure produces
more heat per rack. This trend will propel
convergence of liquid and air-cooling
technologies for effective and efficient
cooling leading to increased adoption of
indirect evaporative cooling.
Scalable and future-proof architecture
The average tech evolution cycle of IT
devices has been between three to five
years, whereas a data centre infrastructure’s
evolution cycle is 10 to 15 years. This
demands a high degree of flexibility of
data centre facility to support two to three
evolution cycles of ICT devices. Elasticity,
flexibility, scalability and time to deploy
without burdening the CAPEX is becoming a
major ask. We foresee a strong acceptance
and growth of prefabricated modular data
centre facilities.
Full digitalisation and AI-enablement
As such, data centres have undergone
massive growth and discernible evolution,
from humble beginnings as computer rooms
(in KWs) for ICT to massive facilities (in
MWs) to host cloud-based platforms.
While data centres have grown immensely
in size, they have also become more
complex. High-density ICT infrastructure
is now gaining favour and this brings new
challenges that must be overcome. At
Huawei, our experience and expertise in
offering turn-key data centre facility build
have allowed us to work through many of
these technical demands.
Based on these experiences, we have
identified key trends that we believe will
influence the evolution of data centres
across the region.
Data centres currently account for around
3% of the world’s total power consumption.
This will increase as more facilities come into
use. Energy savings, reductions in emissions
and OPEX are major challenges faced by data
centre operators that must be addressed.
Analysts have recognised that advances in
power and cooling are transforming enterprise
data centres as never before. The use of clean
energy and waste heat is a step in the right
direction. Saving essential resources such as
land, water and materials throughout the
data centre lifecycle is paramount to the
sector’s growth.
Effective cooling
When we talk about sustainability, it’s
worthwhile to look specifically at effective
cooling. Large-sized data centres generate
The Middle East’s evolution towards
digital infrastructure is accelerating,
particularly the rapid adoption of AI
applications. Data centres will benefit
from this trend as more digitalisation gets
embedded across the DC lifecycle from
planning and construction to O&M, energy
management and resource optimisation. •
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