Key data centre trends for 2022

Data centres will next year accelerate moves to mitigate the climate crisis, according to Vertiv.

The company has released its list of the key data centre trends to watch in 2022, with experts predicting long-held conversations around efficiency and utilisation in the data centre evolving to reflect a more comprehensive and aggressive focus on sustainability.

This movement recognises the urgency of the climate crisis, the relationship between resource availability and rising costs, and shifting political winds around the world.

“As we move into 2022, data centre operators and suppliers will actively pursue strategies that can make a real difference in addressing the climate crisis,” said Vertiv CEO Rob Johnson.

“For our part, we continue to focus on energy efficiency across our portfolio, as well as alternative and renewable energy technologies and zero-carbon energy sources, to prioritise water-free cooling technologies, and to partner with research leaders and our customers to focus on impactful sustainability efforts.”

The actions data centre decision-makers take on these fronts will have a profound impact on the digital economy in 2022 and beyond. The urgency of these challenges is reflected in the 2022 trends identified by Vertiv’s experts. Those trends are as follows.

Data centres tackle sustainability and the climate crisis

The data centre industry has taken steps toward more climate-friendly practices in recent years, but operators will join the climate effort more purposefully in 2022. On the operational front, Vertiv experts predict some organisations will embrace sustainable energy strategies that utilise a digital solution that matches energy use with 100% renewable energy and ultimately operates on 24/7 sustainable energy. Such hybrid distributed energy systems can provide both AC and DC power, which adds options to improve efficiencies and eventually allows data centres to operate carbon-free. Fuel cells, renewable assets and long-duration energy storage systems, including battery energy storage systems (BESS) and lithium-ion batteries, all will play a vital role in providing sustainable, resilient and reliable outcomes. Thermal systems that use zero water are in demand, and we will see refrigerants with high global warming potential (GWP) phased down in favour of low-GWP refrigerants.

More immediately, extreme weather events related to climate change will influence decisions around where and how to build new data centres and telecommunications networks. Other factors, including the reliability and affordability of the grid, regional temperatures, availability of water and renewable and locally generated sustainable energy, and regulations that ration utility power and limit the amount of power afforded to data centres, play a part in the decision-making as well.

These extreme weather events will drive more robust infrastructure systems across the information and communications technology (ICT) space which will need to be carefully aligned with sustainability goals. In 2022, data centre and telecom operators will wrestle with these issues — and ever-present latency questions — and will drive a need for solutions that can address all of these challenges.

Artificial intelligence gets real

As today’s networks get more complex and more distributed, and the augmented and virtual reality demands of the metaverse become more prominent, the need for real-time computing and decision-making becomes more critical. This real-time need is sensitive to latencies, and under the increasingly common hybrid model of enterprise, public and private clouds, colocation and edge, full-time manual management is impractical, if not impossible. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be critical to optimising the performance of these networks.

It will take focus and time to collect the right data, build the right models and train the network platform to make the right decisions. However, the programming tools have become simplified enough that data scientists are able to point computing resources at a problem without having to be experts in programming or hardware. The availability of AI hardware from established vendors, cloud options for the same, a simplified toolchain and an educational focus on data science has put AI in play for even smaller companies. It all adds up to accelerating AI adoption in 2022.

As with every technological advance, there are ripple effects. The increase in AI will unavoidably increase computing and heat densities and, by extension, accelerate the adoption of liquid cooling. Among other challenges, lowering the barrier to entry places a premium on choosing the right vendors, platforms and systems to trust.

The post-pandemic data centre takes shape

Some 2.9 GW worth of new data centre construction is underway globally — up from 1.6 GW in 2020. Those data centres will be the first built specifically to meet the needs of a post-COVID world. More activity will be focused at the edge, where VMware projects a dramatic shift in workload distribution — from 5% currently to 30% over the next five years. Availability will remain the top priority, even at the edge, but lower latency is a rising need to support healthy buildings, smart cities, distributed energy resources and 5G. 2022 will see increased investment in the edge to support this new normal (remote work, increased reliance on e-commerce and telehealth, video streaming) and the continuing rollout of 5G.

Drive toward integration

Various data centre equipment providers have been embracing integrated systems that allow for modular capacity additions for years, with integrated racks and rows among today’s most popular data centre offerings. In 2022, we’ll see the next step in integration as data centres work with providers to better integrate larger systems — all components of the power infrastructure, for example — and deliver seamless interoperability.

The benefits of integration as a concept are well known — reduced construction and deployment costs, flexible capacity management — and applying the same approach across larger systems delivers speed. Rack-based power solutions are early accelerators of integration momentum.

“With warming occurring faster than projected and extreme weather events increasing in frequency and severity, there’s now an urgent need for society, government and industry to address climate change. Business heads can lead the way toward a decarbonised future, and technology will back the race,” said Robert Linsdell, Managing Director Australia and New Zealand at Vertiv.

“While there are plenty of game changers coming down the pipe, data centres don’t need to wait for emerging technologies to go greener. From renewable energy sources to water-free cooling technologies, businesses are primed to reduce emissions through the cogs that power our data-hungry lives.”

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