Data centers construction trends

High reliability of modern data centers allows owner to focus on its effectiveness. This is important both for their owners (serves as a basis for reducing costs), and for consumers of data centers (promises to reduce the cost of services). In one of the keynote speeches at the DataCloud Europe 2018 conference, Schneider Electric Senior Vice President of the IT Division of Schneider Electric estimated the efficiency of data centers over the past ten years to be 80%. It was mainly achieved due to the improvement of engineering infrastructure. By ten years, the typical energy efficiency factor has dropped from 1.84 to 1.17.

However, a new 80% increase in the efficiency of data centers over the next ten years will require other approaches, dictated by the rapid growth of computing power and legislative restrictions because of environmental impact. The increase in the density of server capacities and operating temperature of the chips actualizes the use of air cooling instead of air.

Trends are determined by customer needs

The requirement to shorten the deadline and simplify the deployment process (especially against the background of the experts' need for customers to quickly enter the market with innovations, which is becoming a critical factor in business success) keeps demand for various solutions for high availability for engineering infrastructure. We collected the main directions of development in the sphere of designing data centers.

1. The solution of approximately the same tasks for the IT infrastructure ensures the use of convergent architectures in the construction of one or several racks: this allows a 20% reduction in deployment time and a 15% reduction in capital costs.

2. Reducing the cost of Li-Ion batteries gives hope for the replacement of diesel generators out of data centers by storage systems of electric power on storage batteries. According to calculations by 2020, a solution to support power for 2.5 hours on Li-ion batteries for consumption of 10 MW will cost $ 200 per 1 kW, which is equivalent to the cost of a diesel generator set.

3. According to specialists' calculations, the software control of power supply at peak loads allows for 25% more servers to be powered by the same electric power supplied, while reducing by 4% the total cost of ownership for each server.

4. Data centers are developing DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) development ideas, cloud-based software management systems that are an adequate response to the apparent challenges in building. These systems are able to provide remote control and management of objects, dynamic scaling of the infrastructure, high reliability of its operation based on the collection and processing of big data. The use of the platform will save up to 30% of operating costs by automating and optimizing maintenance processes and increasing energy efficiency.