design &
facilities Management
A major
infrastructure
refresh is going
to be necessary
to meet future
connectivity
demands.
and rack size/design. Readers
won’t be surprised to hear that
IT kits (servers and storage) are
being designed ever denser and
ever smaller, so the standard
cabinets found in today’s data
centres could become rather
inefficient in terms of space usage
in the not too distant future. Not
to mention the cabinet design
requirements that the Open
Compute project generates…
And then we move on to the
power side of things. Lithium-
ion batteries are already making
significant inroads into the data
centre space. And I’m pretty
sure that I’ve read about at least
one data centre’s power supply
being generated via anaerobic
digestion of waste materials. And
data centres being situated by
hydroelectric dams or having their
power supplied by solar energy is
almost standard practice in some
parts of the world. Also, don’t
forget the ‘resurgence’ in liquid
cooled servers (not sure that the
liquid cooled technology has
reached the storage right now,
but presumably it’s only a matter
of time.)
Infrastructure refresh
Speed seems to be the number
one driver that will impact the
data centres of the future. 100G
seems to be the objective right
now, but you won’t be surprised
to hear that that’s just a stepping
stone on the way to 200G and
400G connectivity speeds coming
our way by the early 2020s, if
not before. Now, the cables that
can ‘cope’ with these speeds are
unlikely to be the ones sitting in
the data centre right now. So, a
major infrastructure refresh is
going to be necessary.
Oh, and while the cables are
being replaced, it’s probably just
as well to think about the cabinet
May 2017 | 29