This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: Intelligent Sustainability†
As the world moves from Web 2.0 to web3 – which is shaping up to be commissioned later this decade – power plants that will deliver new and expanded services are undergoing major upgrades to meet the needs of users. They’ll provide more bandwidth than we’ve ever seen, but they’ll use less power from the wall.
How is that possible? This is because we are going modular: we can replace the individual parts of a data center much faster and more efficiently than in previous years. We also do not see the high number of data bottlenecks as was common in the past. This is because we now have more efficient network pipelines, better/thinner software, more solid state data storage, newer, faster, cooler running processors, and a host of other improvements.
All of these components can now be slid in or out of data centers in the blink of an eye when not working. It used to take weeks or months to make hardware upgrades or improvements to the data center. This means that we have the best and fastest components in our data centers at all times.
New super data centers and telecom interconnections are also increasingly replacing entire first-generation facilities. There are some model data centers that stand out as forward-looking examples of scalable power consumption, lower power consumption, low carbon footprint and carefully planned durability use of natural energy sources. Data center builders can learn a lot from these facilities as examples of how to provide enough IT power while still embracing the environment.
Much more power, bandwidth needed for Web3
We will need a lot more power and bandwidth to run Web3 and metaverse-type applications that require much higher powers, including apps with cryptocurrency, high-end gaming, big data analytics and machine learning, 3D video and graphics, as well as augmented reality.
AWS, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft, Dell EMC, Apple, Facebook, VMware, Oracle, AT&T, Verizon and other industry leaders are building new hyperscale, modular data centers around the world that will provide most of the horsepower for IT demands of the future. They all use new federal and state guidelines for power consumption, provide carbon footprint statistics, and integrate natural energy sources (typically hydro, wind, and solar). They all have exemplary PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratings.
PUE is a metric – or score – used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center; it is determined by dividing the total amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the IT equipment in it. For example, Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon’s data center facility ran an exemplary PUE of 1,078; Google’s numerous data centers average below 1.20 across the entire global system. In general, a PUE of less than 1.50 is considered top.
It can take about two years to set up a conventional data center from concept to implementation and functional use. In contrast, implementing a modular data center is much faster and often takes 50 to 75% less time – and, as CFOs like to point out, that equates to a lot of capital saved.
Facebook’s Exemplary Prineville Modular Data Center Campus
Being able to install a data center in a shorter time is a major competitive advantage.
This is exactly what Meta is doing now. In Prineville, Oregon, a small town on the western edge of the state’s eastern desert 80 miles south of the Columbia River, there are 11 massive buildings on a single sandy campus, covering a whopping 4.6 million square feet. to space. Each of these buildings is the size of a few large Walmarts, and they seem horribly out of place in an area known more for hunting and ranching than anything else. Those 11 data centers were all built over a 10-year period.
Each of the data centers has a single task, such as managing the main Facebook app, the company’s business sites, WhatsApp, Instagram, apps for Quest AR and other services; several are the holders of saved images. Some data centers contain as many as 15,000 servers, and most of those extendable units are custom designed and built by Facebook itself. Several staffers are deployed day after day to do just one thing: look for red lights on the stacks of servers, take them out and replace them with new units.
Modest Prineville was the site selected for Facebook’s first and largest hyperscale greenfield data center development, and it continues to operate efficiently 24/7, as required by Meta.
The Prineville Data Center is supported by 100% renewable energy, including: two solar projects based in Oregon. The facility, one of the most energy-efficient in the world, features an innovative cooling system designed for the unique climatic characteristics of central Oregon.
These facilities are designed to take advantage of the predominant southerly winds that blow into them, are cooled by large water-covered screens, channeled into the central server room, and then blown out of the building through vents on the other side. Little or no air conditioning is needed even when the desert environment reaches the range of over 100 degrees.
These precise design features, plus the use of alternative power sources throughout the campus, distinguish a modern modular data center from the first-generation facilities built 10 to 30 years ago – which still occupy approximately 90% of all data centers. So there is still a long way to go in modernizing most of the cloud and enterprise IT, all of which is housed in some data center.
How can a modular data center enable sustainability?
Modular data centers provide flexibility by allowing enterprise customers renting colocation space for their servers to start with small installations and expand as needed. They can use any type of hardware they need for their use cases: standard servers, storage and networking, or hyper-converged hardware with multiple functions within a single device. The latter has been a huge trend for over a decade; In general, the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) models have delivered more energy-efficient performance than separate server/storage/network setups because all functions are contained in a unit with a single power source.
Speed of implementation, supply chain disruptions and limited availability of skilled IT staff are three of the most frequently cited reasons why companies are moving to modular data center solutions. Colocation facility owners are also affected by four specific industry trends: edge computing, expanding the remote workforce, reducing CapEx and OpEx, and increasing sustainability and environmental friendliness.
Gartner Research predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge, with many of these new data centers handling the influx of streaming data from cloud applications. For colocation facilities, this means now is the time to be present in emerging edge markets by leveraging modular data center components.
By 2025, 85% of infrastructure strategies will integrate on-premises, colocation, cloud and edge delivery options into modular data centers, compared to 20% in 2020, according to Gartner†
More IT is processed, less power is consumed
According to industry leaders, by the end of the decade, about 75% of the world’s data centers will get more than half of their power from renewable natural resources, such as wind, solar and hydro. With that number now only around 10%, the IT industry still has a long way to go.
However, data center efficiency is steadily improving, largely due to modular data centers where components can be easily and quickly replaced if they are not performing well. Currently, industry experts estimation that data storage and transmission in and from data centers consume 1% of global electricity. This share has hardly changed since 2010, although the number of internet users has doubled and global internet traffic has increased fivefold since, according to the International Energy Agency†
The goal of the data center industry is that the use of coal, natural gas and petroleum products to power these major IT providers will be largely a thing of the past by the beginning of the next decade. And the industry is well on its way to achieving that goal.
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