News in the Channel – February 2023

HYPERSCALE DATA CENTRES

Believe the hype With businesses using ever-increasing amounts of data, hyperscale data centres are coming of age – which is creating threats and opportunities.

Data is being created in ever increasing amounts by businesses in all sectors, and using that in ways to drive increases in performance and the bottom line. This means that hyperscale data centres are becoming more important. Ernest Popescu, head of Global Site Selection at Iron Mountain Data Centers, anticipates further growth in the coming years. “Growth in data centres is going to continue to be driven by investment in things like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), along with ongoing growth and continuous improvement in other technology,” he says. “There’s an insatiable appetite for data centre infrastructure and with the advent of AI and ML, with a lot of customers moving their loads from on-premises to off-premises storage, and then beyond that, even things like mobile phone pictures for example – megapixel resolution increased from 0.11 in the early 2000’s to 12 in recent years. There’s going to be continued insatiable growth and appetite for data centre investment. “The industry is going to continue to experience explosive growth in the coming years. I think penetration is measured as a percentage sort of X over Y, but I think

it’s a flawed metric in a sense that Y, the denominator, is constantly increasing because new technology is being developed and existing technology requires more storage. The megapixel evolution of the photos we store on our phones is a good example of that. And then as AI and ML continues to become generally accepted and that requires constant 24/7 high compute resources. I think that the future for the data centre industry is bright.” Tom Kingham, director, Solutions Engineering at CyrusOne, agrees, saying that increase in demand from consumers for cloud-based services is also driving growth. “Historically this was far more driven by enterprises, but there’s now a very fast catch up from individuals on this,” he says. “Plus, you still have plenty of enterprises that haven’t yet made the leap into cloud and are doing so at ever increasing pace as they realise that the tools, applications and so on that are available to them. And the reliability, of course, is far greater by outsourcing it effectively than trying to run it all themselves.” Colocation evolution Tom adds that the data centre market is evolving, with some data centre operators being smaller colocation type operators, where smaller enterprises would maintain their own equipment and take responsibility for storing their own data and processing it. Then there are those companies that have fully embraced the cloud. “Those are becoming more steadily distant from each other,” he says. “It was only five to 10 years ago that we were building far five-megawatt data centres and thinking these were very large. Now talking about almost the standard size being about 100-megawatt.” Sam Bainborough, sales director EMEA- Strategic Segment Colocation & Hyperscale including Facility Management at Vertiv, adds that some colocation data centre providers are housing leased hyperscale clients as well. “We’ve seen exponential growth within the colocation data centres based on hyperscale clients not wanting to house all of their data internal of their own data centres,” he says.

Ernest Popescu head of Global Site Selection

Iron Mountain Data Centers

ironmountain.com/uk

Tom Kingham director, Solutions Engineering CyrusOne

cyrusone.com

CONTINUED