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Data Centers: Custom Facilities Optimized for Location
What keeps operators of large data centers awake at night? An IDC report authored by Trevor Clarke and Mathew Oostveen investigates the biggest challenges that data center operators are facing. The study looked at data centers in Australia.
The major pain points of data centers identified by the report, not too surprisingly, include:
- Aging Data Centers
- Power
- Cooling
- Security
The report found that many of the data centers in Australia are aging and are in need up upgrades and retrofitting. There are roughly 90,000 data centers in Australia with an average age of 7.7 years. But the problem of aging facilities isn’t isolated to Australia. In the US, for example, data center facilities average 12 years in age.
Technology for servers and data centers has changed dramatically just over the past few years. Many data centers are looking to upgrade, retrofit, and rennovate. Owners are seeking to reduce costs and to become more ‘green’. As a data center grows in size, typically the power and water consumption of the facility increases. Upgrades of existing data centers are not easy though. Once built, trying to change or correct physical or site parameters, for example to achieve energy savings, can be very difficult.
Increasingly new data centers are being designed to be optimized based on the location of the facility. Some of the parameters in the mix include energy, climate, humidity, and air and water quality.
How are data center efficiencies measured? Three common measures of data center efficiencies that are frequently used are:
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) – efficiency of power usage at the data center
- Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) – carbon emissions of an operating data center
- Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) – measures the efficiency of water for cooling
