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Future Data Centers: Smaller and Embedded in Neighborhoods
What will Data Centers look like 10 years from now? Emerson Network Power recently surveyed Data Center professionals to get an idea about how they think that their industry will change.
Steve Hassell, President, Data Center Solutions at Emerson, summarized the results of the survey. “We didn’t know what to expect… There were expected results such as increased utilization of the cloud, and some ambitious predictions, such as largely solar-powered data centers and power densities exceeding 50kW per rack. But the common denominator was that most believe that we’ll undergo a massive change to parallel the change that occurred the 11 years prior. The pace of change is only going to increase.”
Scott Barbour, executive vice president at Emerson Network Power, said that “as consumers continue to rely on 24/7 mobile access, network boundaries as they are known today will evolve. Shifting storage and compute requirements will lead the industry to adopt a more flexible data center ecosystem and simplify the way we access business data on the go.”
A major finding of the Emerson report is that data centers of the future are likely to be much smaller and located more closely to their primary users. That finding seems to run counter to the rush by to build massive data centers in locations with cheap electricity and local taxes.
Andy Lawrence, vice president at 451 Research, said that “the data center of 2025 certainly won’t be one data center. The analogy I like to use is to transport. On the road, we see sports cars and family cars; we see buses and we see trucks. They have different kinds of engines, different types of seating and different characteristics in terms of energy consumption and reliability. We are going to see something similar to that in the data center world. In fact that is already happening, and I expect it to continue.”
