How to boost data centre resilience and sustainability

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 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.

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.
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.
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 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.
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 EcoStruxure 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.

To find out more about the power of digitisation across the spectrum of energy management and automation in data centres, visit se.com/au.

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