How your data centre will operate by 2025, and what you can do today to prepare

Schneider Electric - As digitisation and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new, more integrated future, not all data centre owners will be equally equipped to handle the new levels of operational agility required.

However, if risks and shortcomings within existing data centre systems and related management strategies are recognised early enough, stakeholders will improve their chances to engineer a smooth transition to the more dynamic future. 

According to intelligence and advisory firm Arizton, the global data centre market will reach $174 billion (S$232 billion) by 2023.

As disruptive IoT technologies create a spike in demand for data centres and as data continues to become more valuable, more sustainable, efficient, adaptive, and resilient data centre infrastructures will be needed if owners are to cash in on this growth opportunity. 

Users will be looking for data centre owners to implement more diverse approaches to enable their cloud and edge migrations, will look to data centres to help them build stronger partner ecosystems, and will expect more support in their efforts to incorporate as-a-service offerings for their customers.

Build your data centre future around these four pillars

To accommodate these rising marketplace demands, data centre owners will be required to step up performance in these four important areas: 

1) Sustainability - The data centre of the future will be expected to both integrate into and accommodate a company's complete upstream and downstream supply chain sustainability data.

Above and beyond just tracking company-based emissions, the notion of Scope 3 emissions (or supply chain-based emissions) will need to be monitored, captured, analysed, benchmarked, and published. 

Data centre operators can begin to manage Scope 3 emissions today by first engaging and evaluating suppliers and partners who have already succeeded in reigning in their Scope 1 and 2 emissions (direct emissions from sources the organisation owns or has control over, and indirect emissions from generating the electricity, heating, and cooling they buy).

In fact, when selecting data centre solution vendors, adherence to sustainable emissions control should factor in as an important evaluation criteria, on par with price and product quality.

Working with established, environmentally-aware data centre infrastructure companies like Schneider Electric, can help to jumpstart such efforts.

Eco-friendly initiatives, such as Schneider Electric's Green Premium programme (focused on structured sustainable resource, reuse, and well-being KPIs) can serve as useful examples for guiding data centre owners in their quest to further formalize sustainability efforts.  

2) Efficiency - Data centre efficiencies, which often encompass only process and hardware performance efficiencies, will soon have to include human resources, Capex, and TCO efficiencies.

By instrumenting devices with intelligent sensors, and by adding more digital services and remote monitoring capabilities, data centres will be able to drive more efficient human resources workflows (faster alerting, more precise predictive diagnostics) which will result in far fewer instances of unanticipated downtime. 

The accelerated use of reference designs will also reduce or eliminate much of the time engineers spend on data centre upgrade design phases.

The designs will be precise, and the necessary quantities of required building materials will become more predictable than when new designs are created from scratch. This limits material waste when new builds are commissioned.

In addition, long-lasting, power efficient, and space-saving technologies such as Lithium-ion batteries can be used during the deployment phases, lowering capex and total cost of ownership (TCO) while shielding data centre servers from unanticipated blackouts and brownouts.  

3) Flexibility - As businesses across the globe scramble to increase flexibility while navigating unorthodox working conditions and unpredictable supply chains, a new mentality for remaining in business has emerged: accelerate your ability to deliver goods and services with Amazon-like speed and precision.

As customers adapt to these new marketplace realities, so must their data centre facilities. Much more flexible data centre designs will emerge that allow data centre owners to pivot and quickly scale up or down as needed to handle the uncertain future. 

Bringing high-data volume workloads closer to the users through edge data centres is one example of how compute power can diversify across regions to address fluctuating market requirements.

The need for speed and accuracy in these more remote environments will also require solutions that save space and offer ease of remote programming and monitoring.

Accommodating these more aggressive marketplace time-to-delivery challenges will also require pre-built data centre compute, power, and cooling capacity in the form of containerised, modular pop-up data centres.

These scalable blocks of data centre infrastructure assets will arrive ready to operate and will be quick to deploy either indoors or out of doors. 

4) Resilience - By bringing in processes, programs, tools, and resources that both enable minimum exposure to hazards and associated risks (like unanticipated blackouts) and rapid reaction and recovery from unplanned events, data centre owners will be in a much stronger position to control their destinies during times of crisis and uncertainty.

Even today, powerful AI-based monitoring tools offer new ways to remotely manage at-risk data centre assets. Schneider Electric's EcoStruxureTM IT, for example, automatically collects critical infrastructure sensor values on a regular basis and submits that data to a centralised data lake in the cloud.

That data is then pooled with other data collected from thousands of other Schneider Electric customer sites.

Once in the data lake, asset behaviour, across many brands of equipment, and across multiple sites is compared.

All actions taken in response to alarms are tracked using data pertaining to equipment behaviour before and after an incident. This output provides a clear record of actions and their consequences, positive and negative.

Such data pool correlation provides a deeper understanding of root causes of problems and can generate predictive reports that advise operators regarding which actions to take before a particular problem results in unanticipated downtime.

AI algorithms identify the critical patterns of equipment behaviour and output reports are generated for stakeholders, greatly increasing the resilience of the data centre. 

Benefit from an updated cybersecurity envelope

A built-in safety net of advanced cybersecurity will be required across each of these four data centre-of-the-future pillars.

New cybersecurity frameworks will evolve that will enable migration to a more holistic security environment and that will account for both new technologies coming in and for legacy technologies that require a strengthening of their cybersecurity levels.

Schneider Electric has taken lessons learned from its own digital journey to develop a Cybersecurity by Design strategy and technology development framework, which serves as a foundation for helping data centres modernise their cybersecurity strategies.

By executing the twofold goal of producing cybersecure products and of offering cybersecurity services that are applicable to data centres, Schneider Electric has established itself as a cybersecurity leader in the realm of data centre power and cooling infrastructure.

The goal is to assure that future data centres remain constantly available, and that ongoing collaborative cybersecurity development efforts will result in even stronger attack detection, better process, and forensic analysis, and more robust cyberattack response solutions.