It wasn’t that long ago when large mainframe computing terminals took up the lionshare of colocated data centers around the world. We’ve come along way since then and as a result, colocated data centers have become somewhat of a 21st century engineering marvel.
Data center architects must keep the industry’s best practices in mind while simultaneously devising new methods of efficiently providing power and cooling to the facility. Let’s take a closer look at some of the emerging data center technologies being presented in the market today.
Floating Data Centers
Data centers must utilize the free cooling techniques available to them in order to become energy efficient. With water covering over 70% of the planet, data center engineers have begun debating whether or not liquid cooling is a feasible long term solution for data center efficiency.
While liquid cooled server racks are nothing new, data center engineers have taken that concept to the extreme by testing data centers that float on water. The idea of a floating data center is simple: If the equipment can be cooled by water, why not put the equipment in the water?
To some, this concept may sound fringe. However, engineers with Nautilus Data Technologies have built a working proof of concept that has successfully floated servers on a barge just 20 miles north of San Francisco, CA.
The Internet of Things (IoT)
Cisco suggests that over 20 billion IoT devices could be in use by 2020. While colocated data centers will likely host the majority of data generated from IoT devices, some may overlook the fact that data centers themselves can greatly benefit from IoT innovations.
“IoT will dramatically change how next-generation data centers are architected at almost every level.” says Andrew Froehlich on the IoT Infrastructure blog.
IoT devices can be configured to gain almost any physical metric possible. Given this unique ability, IoT gives data centers the ability to further automate their operations based on real-time data gathered from IoT sensors.
Density Specific Cooling
Perhaps density specific cooling could be tied into IoT devices, since this technology could heavily rely on data generated from an IoT sensor. Nevertheless, data center architects must engineer solutions that keeps their power usage effectiveness (PUE) at an absolute minimum.
With density specific cooling, data centers of the future can be configured to automatically provide more cooling for higher density racks while providing less cooling to equipment that is sparsely configured.
According to a white paper created by Emerson Network Power, 55% of data center engineers indicated that hot spots were the top issue that they dealt with in their data centers. Hot spots out ranked other common data center issues such as inadequate power, water events or an outage.
