Vertiv predicts that in 2023, trends toward regulation and standardization will be driven by managing data centers’ consumption and carbon footprint.
In 2023, data centers will face increased regulation, and third-party control as the world continues to struggle with the industry’s expanding energy and water usage against the backdrop of continued climate change. One of the five industry trends for 2023 identified by Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, is the increased attention on the data center’s total environmental and social effect.
“As more and more applications require computing and storage, the data center business is expanding quickly, causing a correspondingly rapid rise in energy and water use in data center facilities. According to Giordano Albertazzi, Chief Operating Officer and President of the Americas at Vertiv, “the industry has recognized that pursuing energy and water efficiency is essential for future success and survival.” “More regulation is unavoidable and will spur significant advancements in our business. The process might not always be simple or straightforward, but it can be handled with knowledgeable data center partners and cutting-edge technologies that can adapt to the changes while satisfying the steadily growing demands of data center applications.”
Recent years have seen a peak in the amount of energy servers require due to chip design and manufacturing improvements that restricted server power consumption over the first 15 years of the 2000s. Server power usage has increased by 266% since 2017, according to statistics from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), according to research published recently by the Uptime Institute titled Silicon heatwave: the imminent change in data center climates. This uptick is one of numerous technical and market variables recognized by Vertiv’s specialists as pushing the emphasis on sustainability and environmental consciousness in several 2023 trends. The following trends:
In the data center industry, regulations are increasing
Governments at all levels are being compelled to look more closely at data centers and their excessive use of these resources due to mounting pressure to satisfy consumer demand for energy and water. According to estimates, data centers currently account for up to 3% of the world’s electricity usage and are expected to reach 4% by 2030. The typical hyperscale operation uses 20 to 50 MW of power annually, which could power 37,000 households. In 2023, the analysts at Vertiv predict this will lead to more governmental scrutiny.
In specific locations, it has already begun. Data center energy use has been curbed in Dublin, Ireland, and Singapore, and data center water use, particularly in drought-prone countries, is likely to get similar scrutiny.
The typical data center using evaporative cooling systems has a water use effectiveness (WUE) of 1.8L per kWh, according to the US Department of Energy. A city of 30,000–50,000 people would need about 3-5 million gallons of water per day in such a data center. The sector will continue to self-regulate, and moderate, including a preference for more ecologically friendly thermal designs, but governmental control will rise starting in 2023.
The hyperscaler and others shop off the rack.
A recent Omdia survey found that prefabricated, modular data center designs will be a part of 99% of business data center operators’ future data center strategies. That has become the new norm rather than just a trend. Vertiv’s analysts predict hyperspaces will continue to move in the same path in 2023 as they seek the speed and efficiencies that standardization offers.
The top cloud providers worldwide rely on collocation providers, who have been standardizing for years, to implement this more recent concept. These cloud companies outsource their new builds to colors to benefit from their market expertise, repeatability, and deployment speed. Standardization, which can range from modular parts like power and cooling modules and skids to fully-fledged prefabricated facilities, will soon replace the enterprise-specific approach and become the norm for hyper scale and the network edge.
Competition for diesel generators is fierce.
The diesel generator has long been an unsatisfactory but necessary component of the environment surrounding data centers. It depicts a form of energy that is wasted but still needs upkeep or fuel replacement after extended periods of inactivity. When put into use, generators release carbon emissions that operators desperately attempt to reduce. Currently, some organizations construct their data centers with little generator capacity and rely on batteries for more extended load support, up to five minutes in some circumstances.
These are interim measures to reduce the necessity of the generator while the sector looks for other choices, such as new battery technologies, for extended backup power.
Vertiv’s analysts predict that a preferred alternative, specifically hydrogen fuel cells, will materialize in 2023.
These fuel cells have the potential to operate continuously or even continuously after initially acting much like a generator to maintain a brief load.
Higher densities change thermal strategies.
Data center operators increasingly ask for higher-density racks after years of constant rack densities. More than a third of data center operators claim that their rack densities have significantly expanded during the last three years, according to the Up time Institute’s 2022 Global Data Center Survey. This is particularly true for more prominent corporate and hyper scale data centers, as 20% of facilities operating at or above 10MW reported racks higher than 40kW, and nearly 50% of those at or above 10MW reported racks higher than 20kW.
This is consistent with the advancement and maturation of liquid-cooled server technologies and their rising acceptance and uptake. The increases mentioned above in server power usage are taking place as operators face increasing pressure to boost capacity swiftly. As a result, they are forced to push the limits of already-existing facilities by adding computers in constrained areas, raising rack density, and developing thermal profiles that demand liquid cooling. Although liquid cooling is not a novel technology, the early wave of productive, effective, and trouble-free deployments in high-density settings has produced proof of concept that will accelerate acceptance in the upcoming year. This tendency will pick more steam as new OCP and Open19 standards incorporate direct-to-chip cooling.
At the edge, 5G and the met averse collide.
In its 2022 Mobile Subscription and Revenue Forecast, Omdia predicts that by 2027, more than 5.8 billion mobile subscriptions, or over half of all subscriptions, will be 5G, bringing computers closer to the consumer. The metaverse is an application looking for a very dense, fast network. The two will converge in 2023 as metaverse implementations use 5G networks to provide the ultra-low latency features the application requires. In the end, this will necessitate more powerful processing in those 5G edge sites, and we’ll soon see that happen – with early forays in 2023 and more extensive deployments in the following years.
The infrastructure required to support the network’s edge will advance along with it. This will involve the increased use of lithium-ion UPS systems at the edge, a trend that saw the share rise from 2% of sales in August 2021 to 8% in August 2022, according to IDC. It will also include technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality planning and management systems.
