Not only will this make the existing data center more efficient, but delay the need to build a new facility until absolutely necessary, both of which are greener for the planet. Simulation with a digital twin can help minimize these by empowering managers to optimize the facilities’ performance, so the use of available capacity can be maximized without risk to the IT equipment. The other major challenge stemming from increased power consumption are the environmental consequences. What’s more, data center digital twins can help protect against power distribution fragmentation triggered by operational changes, by enabling the visualization of power distribution and supporting the safe introduction of new high-density equipment to the power network. This predicts for cascade failure, so managers can prepare for potential outages and even protect equipment from downtime. Luckily, digital twin technology can help here by providing an overview of power supply from the grid down to each piece of equipment, facilitating the testing of power connections, and enabling the simulation of failure scenarios.
If an increased power requirement is improperly handled it will result in outages with damning knock-on impacts for the associated businesses.
The first is managing an increased requirement for power. This raises several challenges for data center managers. Rising demand and increasingly powerful IT has also meant a jump in power demands and energy consumption. Power demands and energy consumption are growing Notably, safely testing the most effective layout for managing various densities and then actioning this in the actual site.
With this technology in place, they can trial different operating scenarios before they’re implemented in real life to identify potential issues ahead of time and therefore mitigate risk. Physics-based simulation with a data center digital twin – a 3D, virtual replica of the physical site – can help tackle these challenges by offering a holistic view of the facility and enabling managers to collaborate on establishing the best possible data center layout. The result being that IT is placed at risk and service delivery times are reduced. This break from the original design considerations means operations teams have an increasing number of factors to coordinate and creates competition between data center management silos. The overall power density across the center may not be more than was originally expected, but the variation between zones, racks and servers will be. Meanwhile, another zone could be hosting artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) applications with a higher density of 15 to 20 kW per cabinet. One zone could be managing web traffic and therefore have a relatively low density.
These extend beyond how to implement new high-density equipment to managing the variation of equipment density across the entire facility.Ĭonsider a legacy data center designed to meet much lower levels of density variations than are required today. Although these advancements mean data centers can operate at higher levels of capacity and efficiency to meet business demands, they’ve also created new challenges for facility managers. The densities we’re seeing in 2022 would have been unfathomable 10 years ago. Where in the past high-density, high-performance computing was the preserve of advanced research, modern digital transformation requires this kind of technology across the entire business world to deliver the kind of data-driven applications that meet the expectations of both customers and business leaders.Īs a result, IT manufacturers are producing more high-density IT equipment, which is more powerful than ever, even though the costs of computing capacity are halving every 18 months. Business is moving at an accelerated paceįirstly, the increasing pace of business and rising densities are intrinsically linked because the growing demand for organizations to deliver more online services is supported by data centers and their evolving capabilities. Before we explore this further, we must first understand how these challenges influence one another. These challenges may initially appear to be three separate issues for data center managers, but they’re actually intertwined and can even influence one another.Īnd it’s how they relate that indicates the need for a refreshed approach to managing data centers that’s based on simulation. There are three key pain points for every modern data center: the rapidly increasing pace of business, growing densities, and extensive energy consumption.