The COVID-19 crisis prompted a construction slowdown in 2020 due to safety, staffing and supply chain issues. But even as the rate of new data center construction fell, the industry experienced explosive demand for capacity as the world moved online for work, socialization and entertainment.
As we enter the latter part of 2021, pandemic restrictions have loosened some—at least for now. But the data center space is still feeling the impact of COVID-19 in a number of different ways.
Here is a recap of four recent industry blogs that illustrate some of the current and future issues data centers are facing in the aftermath of a global health crisis:
COVID-19 created supply disruptions worldwide that have had a significant impact on the data center industry. The global chip shortage, in particular, is hampering growth at a time when demand for data center capacity is at an all-time high.
“The capacity at foundries is growing at about 1 to 3 percent per year, but demand for compute is growing faster,” Vlad Galabov, Omdia’s director of cloud and data center research, said. “All types of computing devices are in high demand, and COVID has actually accelerated people’s refresh cycles and purchasing cycles. But capacity at the foundries doesn’t accelerate overnight.”
CPU manufacturers haven’t felt the sting quite as sharply as some other areas of the industry, in part because CPUs tend to generate a greater profit for chip makers than other components. But other industry subsectors, such as network-switch vendors and power and cooling equipment providers are feeling the pressure, both in lead times and expenses.
Some in the industry are predicting a relative return to normal, or at the very least, a more flexible supply chain situation in mid-2022. But others are still wary of the timetable.
With no real end in sight to the post-pandemic supply chain issues, data center owners will invariably bear the brunt of the increased costs for materials and components, as well as an increase in time to value.
Digital transformation accelerated during the COVID-19 crisis, with many organizations turning to artificial intelligence to aid their new digital initiatives.
What this AI boom means for data centers is that processing power is being integrated into the servers that support these processing-intensive applications. With many facilities increasing their rack power requirements, as well as manufacturers adding more high-performance computing servers to the racks, the data center industry is set to face a significant cooling and operations challenge.
Even with the continual optimization of air cooling systems to handle the ever-growing increase in data center power consumption, there comes a point when traditional cooling systems cannot support these high-density racks.
The rate of digital transformation and AI adoption isn’t likely to slow anytime soon, which is causing many organizations to design new data centers and modernize existing facilities with liquid cooling systems, to impart a number of operational, cost and sustainability benefits.
Due to the unprecedented growth and expansion of the data center industry, the cumulative number of data center outages continues to rise. However, according to Uptime Institute’s 2021 annual survey, many individual facilities are reporting fewer outages and interruptions.
According to Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research at Uptime Institute, there was a noticeable decline in data center outages that took place in 2020. But even with the decline, any outage can still impact a wide range of end-clients and interrupt critical services.
One way to mitigate downtime and ensure data center reliability is to build in redundancy across all systems supporting the data center. Moving forward, Vice President of Research for Uptime, Rhonda Ascierto, posits the industry’s increased adoption and optimization of data center automation could be the overarching solution, further reducing the risk of critical outages caused by human-miscues.
“The big takeaway from this is that [data center] outages are still continuing to happen,” Uptime CTO Chris Brown said. “We’re not getting worse, but we’re not getting any better. As an industry, we really do need to figure out where those outages are coming from and start figuring out how to address them.”
In this interview with Voices of the Industry, Sean Baillie, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Connectivity Strategy at QTS Realty Trust, discussed the post-pandemic state of the colocation data center industry for three vertical markets: hyperscale, government and enterprise.
Baillie predicts hyperscale will continue to proliferate and extend across multiple markets and business sectors. He expects what used to constitute a 10 megawatt hyperscale deal three years ago will now reach upwards of 36 megawatts over the next few years.
Baillie also noted that many federal, state and local government organizations that have on-premise data centers reaching obsolescence are opting to shift into colocation facilities.
On the enterprise front, Baillie observed that, “Enterprise digital infrastructure deployments are accelerating, expanding and starting to take on junior hyperscale-like requirements for space, power and connectivity. What used to be normal enterprise requests for 250-500 KW environments are now requests for multimegawatt, multisite engagements.”
The COVID-19 crisis has far-reaching implications for the data center industry. The past year and a half has presented a number of challenges and opportunities for data center construction and colocation that we will continue to see play out over the next several years.
Check out “3 Tips for Expanding Your Data Center Facility Without Breaking the Bank” to learn how to adapt and scale your facility to the changing data center market.