Data centres are becoming more popular as IT professionals and companies gather more information and data they need to store securely, including customer information. Almost everything about us is online, which can be mined for information to allow businesses to market their products to us at an even greater capacity.
However, this also means that companies need space to store vast amounts of accrued information because much of this information could be (and indeed is) classified as personal information and must be stored securely.
Data centres fill this role perfectly — extensive facilities with round-the-clock security and built-in failsafe. New technology designed to make data centres a safer place to store information than your basement server room is paving the way for an explosion in their popularity.
While CBRE reported in July 2023 that there is a worldwide shortage of data centre space, the future looks bright.
The data centre industry’s transformative growth
Data centres have experienced a seismic shift in their utility worldwide in recent years. Thanks to technological advancements like the use of artificial intelligence, data mining, digitisation of business practices, and the use of cloud storage.
This has led to consistent growth in the data centre industry over the past decade, with American data centre businesses projected to generate revenue of US$342.10 billion in 2023.
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JLL’s data centre global report findings
Jones Lang LaSalle real estate has also issued a global report on data centres and their growth predictions for the future. There were a few key findings from the report.
- Primary users of data centres are on the east and southwest coasts of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe. There is also much data centre usage in Australia, New Zealand, and China. Emerging and secondary markets appear in India and other Southeast Asian nations.
- A compound annual growth rate of 11.6 per cent between 2021 and 2026, with the hyperscale market predicted to grow at 20 per cent in the same timeframe. Hyperscaling measures a technology’s ability to keep up with demand.
- Since data centre operators run up large energy bills, finding ways to create energy-efficient centres is becoming a top priority for these organisations. This includes finding ways to use water more efficiently, as it is a key element in the cooling systems used by data centres.
Embracing tech advancements: the backbone of data centres
Since the explosion of the need for data centres in recent decades, the challenge for data centre operators has always been keeping up with demand. This has led to brand-new innovations within the community, including using state-of-the-art cooling systems for larger-scale data centre operations.
To keep costs down, further innovation has come in the form of virtual servers. These are cloud-based servers that harness all the computing power and features of a physical server but in the cloud. This has negated the need for data centre providers to expand their physical capacities and saved them money on real estate.
However, just like everywhere in the tech sphere, the most significant transformation of the data centre has been the use of artificial intelligence in various ways that we’ll touch on in a later section.
Modern business demands are large-scale data storage, constant access to information, and information security, mainly when dealing with sensitive customer information. The advancements in data centre capabilities have allowed data centre users to expand their businesses, harness the power of AI and information-gathering about their customers, and expand their customer base.
The rise of hyperscale data centres
“Hyperscale data centres” are a term you may not have heard of before. This is, essentially, a massive data centre with an infinite capacity for growth to meet the scalability of the business. These data centres are used by companies like IBM, Google, Facebook, and Amazon – who, through these centres, can scale their businesses without worrying about data storage solutions interrupting their business plans.
The key differences between a traditional (or “enterprise”) data centre and a hyper-scale data centre are capacity and performance. Enterprise data centres may only operate a few hundred servers and can host many companies within their infrastructure.
Larger-scale companies like those mentioned above need dedicated space. These companies will often have their own hyper-scale data centres — often comprised of 5,000 and 10,000 servers with access to the best cooling and security technology that money can buy.
Additionally, these companies expect data transfer speeds between servers and end-users of forty gigabytes per second. Enterprise data centres, on the other hand, run somewhere between 10 and 30 gigabytes per second.
According to predictions from Precedence Research, the hyper-scale data centre market will expand by 27.9 per cent CAGR between 2023 and 2032, increasing from US$80.16 billion to US$935 billion in market potential over the same period.
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AI’s influence on data centres
As data centres expand their footprint in the digital and physical space, their reliance on artificial intelligence is increasing. AI’s capacity goes beyond number crunching, as it can now use predictive analytics to analyse and identify areas of concern.
AI also allows data centre managers to monitor performance and functionality remotely by providing real-time updates and alerts to desktops and phone applications.
Balancing growth and sustainability
One of the main challenges facing data centres is finding a balance between the need to grow at scale with a clientele base that’s expanding its need for off-site server storage — and maintaining a financially sustainable business model as the energy requirements need to keep pace with the ever-growing need for more extensive and larger server cages and spaces, all of which takes vast amounts of energy to keep cool and operate at peak efficiency.
The effectiveness of energy in a data centre is measured by power usage effectiveness or PUE. PUE operates on a reverse scale, where 1.0 is considered perfect energy efficiency, whereas the highest value, 3.0, indicates a very low efficiency level.
Google, Facebook, and all the other largest companies use data centres intended to run at 1.0. Most enterprise data centres run between 1.2 and 1.5 PUE.
For some smaller companies, the colocation cost might not make sense when paired with their desire to upscale their business model about the business climate. However, for larger tech giants, there’s no other way to do it — their businesses are too large and go through too much information to manage it in any other way.
Data centre security and resilience
One of the main benefits of having a data centre for your business information is the additional security of a secure facility. These include information-security features, like firewalls and layers of encryption, and physical security solutions to monitor the building, including cooling towers, fireproof enclosures for servers, state-of-the-art surveillance, and even armed security guards in some cases.
Additionally, data is backed up routinely, and data centres often have built-in redundancies to protect servers in the event of a data breach or an internal security failure.
As a digital ecosystem begins to be created around information and its ability to be stored and shared, data centres that include hyper-scale capacity will become the norm among businesses. Pair this with artificial intelligence adaptability, and data centres will take centre stage in an ever-growing world of information-centric business practices.
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