Sustainability is becoming a big trend to watch with data centers. The reality is there is currently a lot of space that isn’t being used. Instead of building new buildings, it is more efficient and there are a lot of ways to use what is already here.
I recently had an opportunity to have a conversation about this very topic with Emilia Coverdale, marketing project manager, Asperitas. She says, “With immersion, you can save up to one-fifth of the floor space. That is only aspect one. But linked to that, with air cooling, you have to have a specific type of climate as well. You can utilize spaces and hot climates like India.”
Asperitas delivers plug and play immersion cooling for cloud service providers, enterprise IT, emerging tech developers, and HPC data centers anywhere, even in hot climates. The bottomline here is data centers can do more with immersed computing.
“We commissioned some research and the top drivers for immersion that we found, well, sustainability is such a strong term, but it was the top one,” says Coverdale. “Performance, because people obviously want to adopt this technology, but they are afraid of how that will affect performance. They want to make sure this is a good solution for high performance compute. Reliability, so it is what our communication is centered around those three things: sustainability, performance, and reliability. Those are also risks as well.”
When looking at what key stakeholders are essential here, Coverdale says data-center infrastructure and facilities management teams are a target as they become essential ongoing partners to maximize the business needs and performance of the immersed workloads.
We also know AI (artificial intelligence) will play a big role at the data center as well, with AI infrastructure spending expected to propel data center capex to more than half a trillion dollars by 2027, with worldwide data center capex forecast to grow 15% by 2027. This is something I have written about in-depth recently.
Still, we are early in the game here. Many data-center operators are still determining their next move when it comes to AI. One thing we do know for sure is that data centers are running out of power, and they are running out of space—and operators are looking for a way to improve energy efficiency in the days ahead.
Sustainability will be a big trend for data centers in the future—and many tech companies are making strides to address this. A combination of immersion computing and artificial intelligence could help data-center operators address many of the challenges they face today like meeting business targets, addressing customer needs, complying with regulatory changes, and doing all of this in a world that is becoming more digitized.
At the end of the day, technologies will continue to help all businesses do better work. The question now is how to keep data centers humming along as efficiently as possible in the days ahead.
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