The advancement of technology has compelled the majority of IT companies to adopt new and innovative scenarios. This subsequently means there is a need to upgrade and revamp the data centers to deal with such demands. To note, the data centre is an ecosystem that has been architected to shelter servers and other significant components including storage systems and network assets. Such centers serve the objective to ensure the availability of equipment that runs systems that are vital for business operations.

Data centers offer large-scale data processing and storage capabilities so that organizations of all sizes and even professionals can have a high-capacity and data security.

According to a report, the global data centre market size is expected to grow by US$ 284.44 billion during 2019-2023 at a CAGR of more than 17 percent during the forecast period.

As the sector is large, diverse, complex and adapting to changes in many ways, let us understand the current scenario of companies that are working, and planning in the areas of efficiency, resiliency, workload placement, climate change, and new technology adoption when it comes to data centers.

According to a Data Centre survey report 2019 by Uptime Institute, in almost every area under discussion — whether outages, resiliency, placement of workloads, use of innovation or use of cloud — there is considerable diversity in the strategies being employed in context to data centers. Overall, the industry is open to adopting new approaches and technologies but is doing so cautiously.

Additionally, a majority of companies are concerned about the lack of visibility into the design and operations of public cloud services on which they could be or are dependent. Such apprehension has led to the hindrance in the adoption of the public cloud.

However, a strong sense of adherence is still there with the large privately-owned enterprise data centers, that have undertaken half of all IT workloads currently and is predicted to continue doing so in the near future. Also, many companies expect to own and run their own edge data centers, perhaps in alliance with third parties.

Around one-third of those surveyed have suffered some form of the outage or serious service degradation in the past year, out of which some had to face significant financial consequences.

Here are the key highlights of the survey

•  The large, privately-owned enterprise data center facility still forms the base of corporate IT and is expected to be running half of all workloads in 2021.

•  Operators are significantly affected by outages. Around 34 percent of all respondents had an outage or severe IT service degradation in 2018, while 50 percent had an outage or severe IT service degradation in the past three years.

•  Also, a lack of visibility, transparency, and accountability of public cloud services is a critical issue for enterprises with mission-critical applications. Nearly one-fifth of operators surveyed said they would be more likely to put workloads in a public cloud if there were more visibility. In addition, half of those using the public cloud for mission-critical applications also said they do not have adequate visibility.

•  The improvements in data center facility energy efficiency have slightly gotten worse in the past two years. The average PUE for 2019 is 1.67. Also, kilowatt (kW) rack density is rising, following a long period of flat or minor increases, causing many to rethink cooling strategies.

•  The single biggest cause of outages was power loss that accounted for one-third outages in 2018.

•  Around 40 percent of those surveyed said they use availability zones for resiliency, a strategy that requires at least two active data centers replicating data to each other.

•  IT workloads are being spread across a range of services and data centers, with about a third of all workloads expected to be contracted to cloud, co-location, hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS) suppliers by 2021.

The Uptime Institute Intelligence suggests that the managers/operators should consider that public cloud and other third-party data centre services are not immune to outages or service degradations. The vetting process for third-party services should go beyond a simple review of the service level agreement and include visibility, resiliency, accountability and true costs.

Also, in context to data centre efficiency, further improvements will require significant investment and effort, with increasingly diminishing returns. The operators should focus on maintaining high facility efficiency levels and higher gains may be found by focusing on IT efficiency.

As outages continue to be commonplace and costly, the operators should focus on comprehensive and ongoing resiliency reviews of digital infrastructure that include company-owned data centers and third-party service providers, and that also take into account the effects of climate change (at a regional level).