Feature
Efficiency Is The Name Of Game – Staying Ahead Of The Curve
In A Buoyant Data Centre Market By Viktar Zaitsau, Operations Director – Asset Management at Tetra Tech
The Data Centre industry (DC) is booming, and Covid-19 has clearly accelerated some of the brewing developments in the Facilities Management (FM) of DCs, particularly relating to the advancement of technology and the technical development of personnel to reduce staffing levels.
Business estates and facilities management providers were forcefully pushed by the pandemic to operate in a non- overlapping shift pattern and at a reduced level of employees. Notably, however, the rate of outages did not increase. More and more tasks had to be completed off site, utilising various remote facilities management tools, technologies and methodologies.
The pandemic has forced the FM industry to start adopting technologies leading to predictive maintenance, with a number of reputable and new companies rushing to develop existing tools, such as BMS and CAFM to give their clients analytics on reactive break-fixes, forward works and forward maintenance analytics.
Sustainability Motivation
Net Zero is another important driver in the advancement of DCs. In my assessment, existing stock of DCs are 30 to 100% less energy efficient than the new ones, which have just been built by the hyperscalers (cloud providers and absolute leaders in the area of energy efficiency). DCs that are over ten years old operate at PUE estimated as high as 2.4, with new DCs operating at around 1.2 PUE. It is such an overwhelming contrast.
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Companies going off premises with their IT infrastructure and moving towards cloud have a variety of options. However, they also have their own sustainability targets. As such, organisations should look to impose their energy efficiency and carbon targets on cloud providing companies, and not just requiring them to sign up for the Terabyte of data used – an incredibly simplistic payment mechanism and performance matrix.
The structure of the industry is that more often than not, cloud providers and large enterprises lease the space off the co-location (co-lo) providers, as they cannot build their own data centres fast enough to pick up with the ever-growing demand in data. Therefore, companies should impose efficiency onto co-lo providers (ask for PUE 1.6-1.8 or below). Ultimately, service users pay for the energy bills, so unless asked, co-lo providers have very little interest in having energy efficient facilities.
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