Data Center Design & Planning

Building a datacenter is a long term project and a project for long time. According to the IDC, the average data center is 9 years old. However, Gartner states that any site more than 7 years old is obsolete. In order to avoid major mistakes and increase data center lifespan, Schneider Electric propose a review of data center planning & design.

Source: Schneider Electric

From theory to practice: working in a data center

Even if they have a key role in our life through mails, the Internet, cloud computing, etc.; data centers aren’t well known by the average Joe. The data center industry offers various job opportunities, but who are the people that work there really like?
To answer this question, @Dutch data center association led a series of interviews with various professionals working in the data center sector.
It’s a nice way to discover this “unknown“ world !

Source: Dutch Data Center Association

As confinement lingers on, Interxion’s Parisian data center continues construction

Interxion is currently building the largest data center in Europe in a bid to “answer to the ever-evolving needs of the market”.
The Courneuve construction site hopes to inaugurate its first of four buildings by August 2021, on what used to be an Airbus factory were the first French fighters were built in 1904.

For this new data center, Interxion will only use green and renewable energies and has partnered itself with Smirec to recycle the data center’s heat as a means to warm up buildings and housings.

Source: Le Figaro

Amazon Web Services opens its first data center in Africa

A new data center has just opened in south Africa, this will considerably improve the quality of the region’s server infrastructure.

After Microsoft’s initial opening in Cape Town and Johannesburg, all tech giants are looking to bring their support to the African continent by bringing them a quality cloud infrastructure which is projected to creature up to 112 000 jobs by the end of 2022.

Source: Siecle digital

Will data centers survive to COVID-19 ?

As people are confined at home since 17/03/2020, homeworking tools such as Zoom or Teams have become essential to keep business running, and VOD platforms such as Youtube or Netflix have become the main source of entertainment for the people stuck at home. This has seen an increase of daily electricity and bandwidth usage of 10 to 15%.

But even with this increase, actors in the industry remain confident that this sudden increase in usage won’t create any trouble in the near future as this increased usage at home gets counterbalanced by the reduced activity of bigger industrial actors.

Source: Le Big Data

Three initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers

As more than 4600 data centers exist in the world today, here are three initiatives to reduce their energy consumption:

  • Renewable energies : More and more data centers make use of renewable energies. As a proof of concept, Lefdal Mine Datacenter in Norway is the first carbon neutral datacenter in the world with its usage of wind farms and hydroelectric plants;
  • Natural cooling : Google and Microsoft have both chosen to cool their datacenters by using seawater or having their datacenters being submerged in the sea;
  • Heat recycling : Stockholm aims to build the “Stockholm Data Parks” in downtown neighborhoods, to heat up homes directly.
  • Continue reading “Three initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers”

    The next decade of growth for data centers

    In their article, João Marques Lima and Abigail Opiah give us their prediction of growth of the data center sector for the next 10 years.

    By their estimates, SaaS and cloud services will remain the largest market segment as companies continue to move their workloads off of their company data centers over the next decade.
    Data centers in the US and Europe will move rapidly to green data centers and renewable energy sources as the industry is currently estimated to be responsible for one fifth of all global carbon emissions by 2025.

    Hyperscale data centers and the data center security market are expected to have an explosive growth during the second half of the decade, as the industry will foray into the Asian, African and Latin American markets.

    You can find their full prediction in the article linked below

    Source: Data Economy

    New approaches to power usage efficiency

    More and more steps are being taken to reduce the power usage of data centers, as the ITI strives to develop more energy efficient practices with their PUE concept.

    In his opinion piece, Tony Craythorne argues that as Moore’s Law is coming to an end, servers must evolve from their 1980s blueprints. It is his belief that focusing on other bottlenecks than clock speeds, such as IO and network speeds, and getting rid of obsolete legacy hardware, could be some of the answers to a more power efficient data center.

    You can find his full opinion on the link below:

    Source: Datacenterdynamics

    Nurturing talent in the rapidly growing digital infrastructure industry

    Infrastructure Masons published on their blog a series of concerns related to the talent gap developing in the digital infrastructure industry:

  • The speed of digital technology evolution is widening the gap between the haves and have-nots as the technologically skilled people, who have their skillset evolve with the technology, go further up the stack;
  • Hiring people with relevant skillsets outside of the industry could attract new talent and help develop the existing talent through cross-raining and the exchange of best practices;
  • Measures put in place by battle-hardened predecessors lead to new hires becoming complacent, methods like failure drills could help train them to think differently;
  • There’s tremendous stress put on contractors in the high-pressure environment that is digital infrastructure.
  • Continue reading “Nurturing talent in the rapidly growing digital infrastructure industry”

    Confinement gives enterprises a massive push towards the Cloud

    As more and more people are forced to work from home, many enterprises have had to deal with undersized VPNs and private servers that weren’t designed to handle these kinds of workloads. This has pushed many enterprises toward “software as a service” or SaaS platforms and other cloud-based solutions. As work gets reorganized to the pandemic, some CTOs have to learn on the job how to redeploy their onsite servers as VMs on cloud-based datacenters built to handle these kinds of loads.

    data center industry cloud

    Source: LeMagIT