How Big Data and Internet of Things affect data centers. Power usage. Part 1

Big Data, “big data” continues to expand and grow in volume. According to Science Daily, in 2013, about 90% of all data in the world was created in the previous two years. Information is becoming more and more, especially as the number of Internet users continues to increase at an explosive pace. Currently there are about 2.5 billion Internet users in the world.

In addition, the number of devices and gadgets connected to the network is also increasing. All of these devices, including fitness trackers, camera phones, and even smart coffee makers, generate data that needs to be stored somewhere. With the increase in the amount of data in the world, the need for increasing computing power and free space for storing information also increases.

How does all this affect data centers? Today we consider such a pressing problem as energy consumption.
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Increasing computing power requires more power

Data is becoming more, in the data centers install additional equipment, the data centers themselves are becoming more. Despite the fact that the equipment is now "green", that is, the most energy-efficient, energy to work with the increasing amount of data is required more and more. Already, owners of existing data centers should think about whether the current energy infrastructure will withstand the necessary load? If now this is so, then what will happen in 10-15 years? Will the amount of energy produced in the current region be enough?

To ensure a reliable future for data centers, it is necessary to have reliable, adaptive, renewable and efficient energy sources. What are these sources?

Verne Global, located in Iceland, uses geothermal energy that meets all of these conditions. It is clear that in Iceland there are unique natural conditions, but in many regions there is something to use (a lot of solar energy or strong winds or tides), so you need to think now.

Issue price

Naturally, more energy - more costs. Current pricing concepts in data centers may not be suitable for even the near future. This question also requires detailed study.

Placement of data centers

Interesting ideas are also used to reduce energy costs - for example, hosting servers in cold regions ( Kingservers already wrote about such a data center). Now the most sought-after regions for the construction of large data centers are Finland, Sweden and some other countries.

Energy efficiency indicators of such data centers, if not perfect, are close to this. In addition, many large companies are now switching to alternative energy sources. For example, Google is going to transfer one of its data centers in Finland to energy derived from wind turbines.

Unfortunately, the stability of such energy sources is questionable in many regions, and this problem must be addressed right now - using complex energy sources, combining alternative with classical ones. Such work is already underway.

In addition to energy consumption, an important issue is the structure of data centers, the types of equipment that are used, and many other aspects that we will consider in subsequent articles.