The underlying forces that will drive resource utilization and operational efficiency beyond the push for renewable energy.
Data center leaders have made concerted efforts and significant investments in data center efficiency over the years, as their data centers work toward minimizing wasted spend and consumers, governments, utilities, and regulators work toward aggressive sustainability and renewable energy goals.
Those efforts have seemed to pay big dividends, as new research shows that data center energy consumption grew at just 6% between 2010 and 2018, despite a nearly 550% increase in the amount of computing done in data centers over that same span. While data center operators have invested heavily in technologies aimed at driving power usage effectiveness (PUE) and reducing the amount of energy they require, what will drive data center utilization efficiency in the future once the current drivers - the push for renewable energies and service to the bottom line - have largely been achieved?
Here’s a look at three trends that will continue to drive data center utilization efficiency in the next half-decade and beyond.
More of Moore’s Law
From the time we were tiny technology enthusiasts, Moore’s Law - the hypothesis that computing capability would double every two years as processing chips became increasingly more powerful and complex - has dramatically changed the world. The law continues to prove correct and paved the way for life-changing technologies like home computers, automation, and mobile devices that we take for granted today.
For data centers, the 50-year progression of Moore’s Law has led to a continuous cycle of breakthroughs that push the boundaries of efficiency. General improvements in hardware like servers, switches, and other computing devices enable data centers to pack in more computing power in the same or less space.
Despite some concerns that Moore’s Law is approaching its inevitable end, the predictable and linear progression of smaller, faster, and cheaper hardware will continue to propel data center efficiency for several more years. This is particularly the case with processing, memory, and storage.
The incremental improvements in processor capabilities and speed allow for more computations and operations to be run using the same amount of energy - the very definition of efficiency. Simultaneously, speed and capacity improvements in RAM enable more temporary data storage and faster retrieval for better overall performance in an increasingly smaller form factor and footprint, requiring less space to house and less energy to use.
Services software efficiency
As the world continues to become more software-oriented, frontend and backend software efficiency will play an increasingly important role in helping data centers support their customers’ business needs while maintaining and improving resource utilization.
Data centers are responding. They’re employing teams of software engineers who are solely dedicated to software efficiency. These teams are responsible for making software code overall more effective and efficient through aggressive debugging, enabling batch calls to simplify operations, and other strategies that will drive a Software-Defined Everything (SDx) strategy in the coming years that will automate and optimize processes across data center operations to help them more efficiently handle dramatic increases in network traffic, application weight, and complexity, and ongoing consolidation of services offered within the building.
Centralizing services
Historically, services within a data center lived essentially in silos, with dedicated infrastructure for a single purpose. The result was low server and hardware utilization, which meant low infrastructure utilization even among hyperscale data centers. In fact, 451 Research found that the average server utilization rate in corporate data centers is just 18%, which means a significant amount of capacity goes wasted.
The march toward software-defined data centers (SDDCs) in which infrastructure elements like networking, storage, CPU, and security are virtualized and delivered as centralized services will dramatically improve resource utilization by consolidating into the cloud.
Moving workloads traditionally managed on-premises to the cloud can lower a company’s carbon footprint by up to 88% and is nearly four times more energy-efficient than the average data center infrastructure. As more data centers virtualize and cloud providers’ infrastructure continues to gain efficiency over the coming years, data center resource utilization as a whole will continue trending upward.
The future takes shape
Data center observers have long understood that the facilities are, on average, resource-intensive. But the vital work that data center operators have already begun in earnest is to transform traditional technologies, operations, and processes into more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable operations that will continue reshaping the way data centers perform for the next five years or so.
