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When a fictional fortuneteller rubs her crystal ball, the fog within the orb magically clears to reveal the future. In real life, we need experts with real-world experience to help dissipate the haze and project what’s ahead. That’s why nearly 1,500 data center and IT pros attended DataCenterDynamics Converged SE to gain a vision of the imminent data center.
The event was part of Singapore Data Center week, which celebrates one of the world’s most connected hubs. Schneider Electric hosted a micro data center focused booth, but we spoke with people about all their data center concerns — ranging from full evaluations to optimization and total transformation.
We welcomed special luncheon guests to a briefing by Victor Avelar, Director and Senior Research Analyst, Data Center Science Center, around the IoT and edge computing. Victor spoke about how the explosion of connected devices and data applications has caused bandwidth, latency and processing speed to become big concerns. He explained that this has led to a “foggy view” of the future and could lead to poor decisions such as oversizing infrastructure to mitigate uncertainty.
But, he also assured us that the data center is more predictable then we think and put forth a methodology for planning data center design that maximizes capital utilization and diminishes doubt. Of course, the micro data center is at the core of this approach, and can be a solution to challenges created by the explosion of connected things.
Going Green
On another topic, Victor addressed attendees during a thought leadership session on design and efficiency. The presentation — “An unrelated twosome: Dynamic Redundancy and Greenwashing,” — showed how traditional approaches to building data centers rely on redundancy, adding expense and increasing consumption.
But, emerging approaches and technologies like server power capping, higher and varying operating temperatures, improved disaster recovery sites and the ASHRAE X factor are opportunities for more efficient cooling designs. Victor illustrated “greenwashing” using carbon footprint models. Here is what he said about factors to consider when raising IT inlet temperatures in data centers.
We also wanted attendees to see these data center concepts in action, so we toured the Kingsland Data Center. It’s designed to deliver either Tier 2, 3 or 3+ infrastructure and is housed in a five-story, 208,000 square foot building with more than 80,000 square feet of IT white space. Participants could take a real look at the technology at work including: DCIM, cooling, racks, UPS’ and chillers.
Take Away
Addressing top data center pain points like space constraints, hot spot issues, cooling inefficiency, cost of energy consumption and budget is challenging, but certainly the path forward is clearer for all those who attended.
A micro data center is a great solution to help address these challenges — adding capacity quickly, reducing latency and enabling secure ongoing management through edge computing. And DataCenterDynamics Converged SE is a great forum for learning and collaboration to help us move to the next stage in our data centers.
