Latest innovations: what to expect from the data center market in 2019?

Data center construction is considered one of the fastest growing industries. Progress in this area is enormous, but whether any breakthrough technological solutions will appear on the market in the near future is a big question. Today we will try to consider the main innovative trends in the development of the global data center construction in order to answer it.

Course on Hyperscale

The development of information technology has led to the need to build very large data centers. Hyperscale infrastructure is mainly needed by cloud service providers and social networks: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and other big players. In April 2017 in the world there were 320 such data centers, and in December there were already 390. By 2020, the number of hyperscale data centers should grow to 500, according to the forecasts of Synergy Research specialists. Most of these data centers are located in the United States, and this trend continues despite the rapid pace of construction in the Asia-Pacific region, marked Cisco Systems analysts.

All hyperscale data centers are corporate and do not rent rack space. They are used to create public clouds related to the Internet of things and artificial intelligence technologies of services, as well as in other niches that require the processing of huge amounts of data. Owners are actively experimenting with increased rack power density, boxed servers, liquid cooling, machine room temperature rise, and a variety of custom solutions. Given the increasing popularity of cloud services, Hyperscale will become the main growth driver of the industry for the foreseeable future: here you can expect the emergence of interesting technological solutions from leading manufacturers of IT equipment and engineering systems.

Edge Computing

Another notable trend is just the opposite: in recent years, a huge number of micro-data centers are being built. According to Research and Markets, this market will increase from $2 billion in 2017 to $8 billion by 2022. This is attributed to the development of the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet of Things. Large data centers are too far away from field automation systems. They are engaged in tasks that do not require readings from each of the millions of sensors. Primary data processing is best done where they are generated, and only then send useful information along long routes to the cloud. To refer to this phenomenon, a special term was coined - edge computing or Edge computing. In our opinion, this is the second most important trend in the development of data center construction, which leads to the emergence of innovative products on the market.

Battle for P.U.E.

Large data centers consume huge amounts of electricity and generate heat that needs to be disposed of somehow. Traditional refrigeration systems account for up to 40% of a facility's energy consumption, and refrigeration compressors are considered the main enemy in the fight to reduce energy costs. Gaining popularity allowing to completely or partially abandon their use of solutions with the so-called. freecooling. In the classical scheme, chiller systems are used with water or aqueous solutions of polyhydric alcohols (glycols) as a heat carrier. In the cold season, the compressor-condensing unit of the chiller does not turn on, which significantly reduces energy costs. More interesting solutions are based on a two-circuit air-to-air scheme with rotary heat exchangers and an adiabatic cooling section or without it. Experiments are also underway with direct cooling by outside air, but these solutions can hardly be called innovative. Like classical systems, they involve air cooling of IT equipment, and the technological efficiency limit of such a scheme has almost been reached.

Further reductions in PUE (the ratio of total power consumption to the power consumption of IT equipment) will come from the growing popularity of liquid cooling schemes. Here it is worth recalling that launched by Microsoft project on the creation of modular underwater data centers, as well as the concept of Google floating data centers. The ideas of the tech giants are still far from being industrialized, but less fantastic liquid cooling systems are already in operation in facilities ranging from Top500 supercomputers to micro data centers.

During contact cooling, special heat sinks are installed in the equipment, inside which the liquid circulates. Immersion cooling systems use a dielectric working medium (usually mineral oil) and can be made either in the form of a common sealed container or in the form of individual cases for computing modules. Boiling (two-phase) systems at first glance look like submersible systems. They also use dielectric liquids in contact with electronics, but there is a fundamental difference - the working fluid begins to boil at temperatures of about 34 ° C (or slightly higher). From the course of physics, we know that the process proceeds with the absorption of energy, the temperature stops rising, and with further heating, the liquid evaporates, i.e., a phase transition occurs. In the upper part of the sealed container, the vapors come into contact with the radiator and condense, while the drops return to the common reservoir. Liquid cooling systems can achieve fantastic PUE values ​​(around 1,03), but require major modifications to computing equipment and cooperation from manufacturers. Today they are considered the most innovative and promising.

Results

To create modern data centers, many interesting technological approaches have been invented. Manufacturers offer integrated hyperconverged solutions, software-defined networks are being built, and even the data centers themselves are becoming software-defined. To increase the efficiency of facilities, not only innovative cooling systems are installed, but also hardware and software solutions of the DCIM class, which allow you to optimize the operation of the engineering infrastructure based on data from multiple sensors. Some innovations do not justify the hopes placed on them. Modular container solutions, for example, could not replace traditional data centers made of concrete or prefabricated metal structures, although they are actively used where computing power needs to be deployed quickly. At the same time, traditional data centers themselves become modular, but on a completely different level. Progress in the industry is very fast, albeit without technological leaps - the innovations we mentioned first appeared on the market a few years ago. 2019 will not be an exception in this sense and will not bring obvious breakthroughs. In the digital era, even the most fantastic invention quickly becomes a common technical solution.

Source: habr.com