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From streaming and ridesharing to smart factories and virtual assistants, the modern world has been defined by the rapid development of connected technologies.
Underpinning this shift to a digital-first society are data centers. Packed with hardware, these 21st-century workhorses process and store vast amounts of information daily.
Put simply, data centers are crucial to the smooth running of modern life. Without them, the products and services we take for granted, like banking, remote working, or gaming, wouldn't work.
This importance is often reflected in the headlines when issues affect operations, like a major outage that hit Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users in 2021.
"Data centers are a very important aspect of our day-to-day lives. They need to be resilient."
The consequences of things going wrong extend beyond the realms of social media. Last summer, two data centers in London experienced heatwave-linked failures, with the incident affecting clinical IT systems at a number of hospitals.
The importance of reliability is not lost on those within the industry. Data centers have become "a very important aspect of running entire business models, and even our day-to-day lives. They need to be resilient," Pankaj Sharma, executive vice president of Schneider Electric's Secure Power Division, said.
The stakes, then, are incredibly high. Losing the information processed by data centers would be detrimental not only to companies and individuals, but also governments and society as a whole.
A bigger, changing market
Today, an estimated 5.3 billion people use the internet, compared to 1 billion in 2005.
More users are one thing, but the way we consume content is changing, too. Millions of people live-streaming the Super Bowl, for instance, puts a far bigger strain on servers than reading text-based stories on a news site in the mid 2000s.
Alongside this shift in habits, we're also spending longer with our devices. In the UK, adults were online for an average of just under four hours per day in September 2021, according to Ofcom. That compares to three hours, 15 minutes a day in 2018.
Throw in the increasing popularity of new tools like generative AI — which has a range of applications across numerous sectors — and the need for more data centers becomes even more pressing.
In the US, McKinsey forecasts that data center demand will increase by 10% a year until 2030. A similar picture is emerging in economies like the UK and EU.
The climate-change challenge
Demand is rising at a time when concerns about climate change are heightened.
With countries pursuing targets to cut emissions and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, it's not enough for data centers to be reliable – they have to be sustainable, too.
This puts the firms that develop and operate data centers in a tricky position, not least because today's facilities are resource hungry.
Alongside space, they require water and electricity, using between 220 and 320 terawatt hours of the latter in 2021, according to analysis from the International Energy Agency.
"They take a lot of energy and they create a lot of heat," Sharma said. "A typical one megawatt data center consumes almost 100,000 gallons of water every day, just for the cooling systems."
With a need for operational reliability and a smaller environmental footprint, companies need to strike a balance.
One solution has been to build redundancy into data centers — a term that refers to copies of the kit integral to a site's operations. The idea is that if there's a failure in the main system, duplicates can spring into action, preventing outages. More redundancy, however, means greater use of power and more emissions.
Squaring this circle won't be simple, but those within the sector are up for the challenge. Sustainability and resilience, Sharma said, can and should work hand-in-hand going forward.
Action stations
Within the data center industry itself, moves are being made that could go a long way to solving the sustainability question.
More than 100 data center operators and trade associations have signed up to the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which would make data centers in Europe climate neutral by 2030, and boasts powerful backers like the European Commission. Companies including Amazon Web Services, Google, and IBM have already signed on.
Ambition to enact change is one thing, but technological solutions will also be required. On the sustainability side of things, Sharma highlighted several key areas.
These included energy, greenhouse gas emissions, water, and waste management. Land use and biodiversity would also need to be factored in, too.
Companies can deploy a range of innovations to put these metrics at the core of tomorrow's data centers. "It's about using the best available technologies out there," Sharma said.
Expanding on his point, he highlighted how the integration of "adaptive energy systems" into data center operations could be transformative.
Using AI, smart controls, and software, these "energy spines" can be tailored to a data center operator's needs — incorporating tech like solar panels, battery storage and hydrogen fuel cells.
Instead of just taking all your energy from the grid, you utilize tools and equipment to optimize.
This partial de-coupling from the grid, which can suffer outages and remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels in favor of cleaner sources, could be hugely important to the reliable operation of future data centers.
That's because if a site is producing and storing its own electricity, it ensures security of supply and the ability to maintain operations even if a power outage affects society at large.
"Instead of just taking all your energy from the grid, you utilize tools and equipment which a company like Schneider creates," Sharma said. "You can choose which sources you want, so you can optimize. You could use a renewable resource, you could use hydrogen, or you could use battery storage."
He also stressed the importance of focusing on cooling optimization and deploying data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software, which allows teams to monitor and control operations at a facility and identify any issues that could lead to outages.
Among other things, DCIM software provides real-time insights into things like power usage effectiveness, or PUE.
"It helps improve the utilization of your equipment inside the data center," Sharma said. "Better utilization means less energy consumed and more output."
Today's data centers have a significant environmental footprint but are also key to a net-zero planet, underpinning the technologies — such as smart meters, solar panels, and energy management systems — that will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and lower bills.
According to Sharma, the future hinges on data centers. They should, he argued, be viewed as the enablers of a net-zero future, rather than energy consumers.
"They're the backbone for sustainability and helping the energy transition," he said. "It's our responsibility — all of ours — to build a sustainable future."
Read more about Data Center Solutions by Schneider Electric.
This article was created by Insider Studios with Schneider Electric.