Data centres have never been under as much pressure as they are today. That’s understandable, given what has happened over the past 20 months. And there’s an urgent need to ensure that our data centres can deal with the increasing demands, fluctuating requirements and regulations, reflecting how we are all now working and living.
For those who manage data centres, one question which will have been asked is how can facilities be modernised, and upgraded as integrated manageable facility? Whether these data centres are on-premise, in the cloud, on the edge, or on a hybrid architecture, the rapid pace of change requires constant reevaluation of data centre asset viability, turnaround time to address change management requirements.
Data centres have to adapt to the current conditions, and each change – be it infrastructure upgradation demand as connectivity, power , cooling , or data demand, data storage or a change in applications – can have a profound effect on the IT equipment required, how data centres are powered, cooled, integrated to support these new IT stacks. When modernisation is neglected or delayed, data centre performance and responsiveness are reduced.
Hakim Lazizi, Secure Power Leader, Middle East and Africa, Schneider Electric
When modernising design to improve performance, efficiency, reliability, integration consider the most important aspects of the data centre that will impact the most:
- Emphasise scalability, security, and visibility to assets – Modern data centres must be Modular, able to scale quickly to handle the influx of data and provide powerful processing and AI capabilities for analysis—all while maintaining the highest availability. Customer data must be protected through a technology ecosystem that ensures a cyber and physically secure environment. Software as a Service (SaaS) based asset management products are popular for providing the needed asset visibility, open integration , allowing data centre staff members the ability to view all data centre assets and devices at all level of the architecture , via their smart phones or through the view given by Datacentre Operation centre . Unified dashboards allow administrators the ability to dive into any issue, initiate the relevant route cause analysis, so they can immediately start troubleshooting and initiate the needed remediation actions .
- Redundancy and power protection considerations- Servers and systems within the data centre requiring the highest levels of availability should be identified and configured to support longer runtime and higher levels of redundancy. They should also be placed in a separate area, and in separate racks. This concept of “targeted availability” helps increase the availability of critical systems without having to incur a large capital expense across the entire data centre, thanks as well to the modular design. Higher levels of redundancy like dual feeds all the way to the rack, with dual generators, and dual inbuilt N+1 UPS are essential for highly critical data centres and networks.
- Lean towards precision cooling and power density control- Machine learning and AI technology requires computing power that produces concentrated heat in the data centre. Sophisticated precision air cooling devices should be deployed and power loads closely monitored so that compute uptime can be maximised.
The criticality of IT is increasing across industries. That means that IT and data centre staffs need to be more aware not only of how physical infrastructure is being impacted by general technology trends, but also by industry specific business transformation. In the retail industry, for instance, data centres have emerged as the heart of the connected retail enterprise. They process the thousands of transactions and orders that come in every day from storefronts, websites, warehouses, and regional and corporate headquarter offices. These data centres also enable omni-channel buying and house big data that tracks online and in-store trends and behaviours thereby driving the ultimate customer experience.
In healthcare electronic medical records make it essential for medical staff to have consistent, secure, quick access to the IT system. Such an application also requires reliable power for backup procedures and archiving. The rack systems, security, IT management software, and power and cooling within the data centre that protect the servers and storage, are critical elements in supporting the medical records system uptime. Integrated cooling solutions are supporting special healthcare applications as white rooms and ICU.
In finance, technology trends such as Banking 4.0 are driving a reevaluation of how data centre architectures are being deployed. With “banking in the palm of your hand” becoming more the norm than the exception, enterprise data centres, many of whose infrastructure assets are 10 years old or even older, are having difficulty aligning technologies to adapt to changing marketplace needs.
Compliances with banking regulation as basel 3 and sarbanes oxley, implementing multi-channel retail banking transformation places the datacentre and Edge transformation at the heart of banking 4.0 transformation.
Across data centre environments, we’re increasingly seeing how agile infrastructure can ensure data centres can adapt quickly to customer demands. The best data centres are scalable, robust, and agile and can respond to rapid marketplace changes.
To learn more about what you can do to modernise your data centre, read our white paper 272, A Framework for How to Modernise Data Centre Facility Infrastructure.
