What awaits the data center industry in the future

What will the data center industry look like in 10-15 years? .. Many IT specialists regularly ask this question and don’t miss the opportunity to regularly voice their thoughts on the future of server farms.

Poll on "Data Center 2025 - exploring opportunities"
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Emerson Network Power in its report “Data Center 2025 - Exploring Opportunities” presented the results of a survey on a topic that concerns the near future of data centers. More than 820 data center professionals from around the world took part in this survey. During the survey, respondents were asked to share their thoughts on how data centers will look like in 10 years. It should be noted that the interviewed specialists did not predict the deployment of scenarios of the “supernatural nature of origin” (as in the dystopia from the cult film trilogy “The Matrix”, where data centers received electricity due to huge fields consisting of “battery people”).

So…

According to the survey, 67% said that after 10 years IT equipment would become more efficient (which is hard to disagree with). The remaining conclusions turned out to be rather contradictory: 43% of respondents hope for the immediate appearance of autonomous data centers that function without the participation of people, while only 7% of respondents believe that such a trend could cost them a job. There was also an opinion that soon there will be a lot of underwater server farms.

Below is a brief list of the most interesting points of the report.

Increase efficiency

64% believe that by 2025, the average data center will require much less electricity to achieve the current level of computing performance. The authors of the report were a little surprised that the number of respondents who expressed such an opinion was not higher, since 84% of survey participants believe that over the next 10 years there will be a significant increase in energy efficiency of auxiliary equipment of the data center. The main ways to improve energy efficiency: more active use of outdoor air for cooling servers and network equipment (free cooling), cooling at the level of individual microchips and increasing the efficiency of servers.

Among the predictions

The sun



In the near future, renewable energy sources (RES) will play an increasingly important role as a source of electricity for average data centers. At the same time, experts were quite optimistic about the use of solar energy to power the data center. According to such forecasts, by 2025 the share of solar power plants will be 21% of the total energy balance of the data center industry. And this means that such a transformation will be a huge leap forward for solar energy. To date, the share of SES accounts for only 2-3% of the total amount of electricity generated worldwide. If we take into account the current technological capabilities in the field of electricity generation using solar panels (efficiency of solar power plants), then the surface area of ​​the array of solar panels must be twice the area of ​​the data center connected to it so that the SES can satisfy at least 20% of the energy needs this data center.

Cold



But in data center cooling systems or temperature control mechanisms, respondents do not foresee any radical changes until 2025. According to forecasts of 41% of respondents, the main method of cooling servers closer to the end of the period under consideration will be the use of a combination of air and liquid. At the same time, the authors of the report decided to speculate on the fact that by 2025 the need for more energy-efficient and productive cooling equipment would simply disappear, since the servers of the future will be able to maintain their operation even at elevated temperatures, and this will reduce the load on the cooling system. and experts from the American corporation IBM. They predict that in the not too distant future, operators of some data centers will maintain the temperature inside the “cold” corridors at a level above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (almost 38 degrees Celsius). The Blue Giant specialists stated that by further improving the server and auxiliary equipment it will allow it to withstand an ever higher operating temperature, which means a significant reduction in operating costs.

Automation



43% of respondents expressed the opinion that by 2025, data center automation mechanisms would be achieved, up to the emergence of “unmanned” server farms that would be sufficiently automated to function properly for indefinitely long periods of time without needing human intervention. According to one of the survey participants:

all devices will have automatic identification tags, and data centers will operate without or with minimal human participation.

Only 7% of respondents are concerned that the transformation of data centers, due to the growing popularity of the trend in automation and autonomous data centers, will affect their work. Many survey participants were not worried about staff cuts, as they are preparing for retirement in the near future. According to the survey, 23% of participants (37% of whom currently live in the United States and work in data centers in the North American state) expect to retire in 2025 or earlier.

Underwater data centers



One of the participants in this survey suggested that in the near future, our planet Earth will become similar to the fictional world from Mad Max’s cinema universe, where water will become such a scarce commodity that the data center industry will have to look for alternative mechanisms for server cooling inside data centers. This respondent expressed his opinion that in ten years there will be a lot of underground data centers in the world (which, by the way, already exist), and then added the following:

There is also the possibility that the data centers will leave land and move into hermetic subsea structures that have access to platforms above the water like oil-producing stations.

Cloud and size



67% percent of survey participants believe that at least 60% of calculations in 2025 will be carried out using cloud platforms. In fact, this is a rather conservative estimate, as according to the report of the Global Cloud Index, published by Cisco, at present the share of workloads associated with cloud platforms accounts for about 46% of all data center workloads worldwide. It is expected that by 2017 this figure will reach 63%. As for corporate server farms, it is very likely that by 2015 they will significantly decrease in size: 58% of respondents expect that in 2025 data centers will be at least two times smaller than the existing ones. At the same time, 10% of the participants in the study suggest that corporate data centers of the future will be ten times lower than modern ones in terms of overall dimensions.

DCIM solutions



They will be assigned a significant role: 72% of specialists believe that by 2025 certain data sets for managing data center infrastructure (Data Center Infrastructure Management; DCIM) will be deployed in their data center. This forecast is much more optimistic than the market analysts and DCIM solutions developers. 29% of respondents hope to increase the effectiveness of monitoring IT and supporting infrastructure of data centers with the help of such software.

Capacity utilization rate

It was suggested that the improvement of data center infrastructure management mechanisms using DCIM solutions would lead, among other things, to an increase in the load on computing power. That in turn will result in increased efficiency of the server farms as a whole. 72% of industry experts believe that the utilization rate of IT-resources in 2025 will reach 60%. Although the average forecast for the whole group suggests that the indicator in question may reach 70%.

For comparison, according to experts, at present, the utilization rate of computing power on average in the data center industry varies from 6 to 12%, whereas in the case of data center leaders, this indicator is 30 to 50%.

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