“As we move into 2022, data center operators and vendors will be actively seeking 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 entire product portfolio, as well as alternative and renewable energy technologies and zero-carbon energy sources. We are prioritizing waterless cooling technologies and partnering with research leaders and our customers to focus on impactful sustainability efforts.”
The actions taken by data center managers on each of 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 experts. These trends are:
- Data centers address sustainability and the climate crisis: The data center sector has taken steps toward more climate-friendly practices in recent years, but operators will join the climate effort more decisively in 2022. On the operational front, Vertiv experts predict that some organizations will adopt sustainable energy strategies using digital solutions that enable the use of 100% renewable energy, thus enabling sustainable energy use around the clock. These hybrid distributed energy systems can provide both AC and DC power, adding options to improve efficiency and ultimately allowing data centers to operate carbon-neutral. Fuel cells, renewable assets, and long-life energy storage systems, including battery energy storage systems (BESS) and lithium-ion batteries*, will play a critical role in delivering sustainable, resilient, and reliable results. Waterless precision cooling systems are seeing increased demand, and we will see refrigerants with high global warming potential (GWP) gradually phased out in favor of low-GWP refrigerants.
More immediately, extreme weather events related to climate change will influence decisions about where and how to build new data centers and telecommunications networks. Other factors, such as network reliability and affordability, regional temperatures, the availability of water and locally generated renewable and sustainable energy, and regulations that ration energy from utilities and limit the amount of power supplied to data centers, also influence decision-making.
These extreme weather events will drive the need for more robust infrastructure systems across the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, which will have to be carefully aligned with sustainability goals. In 2022, data center and telecommunications operators will have to grapple with these issues—and the ever-present concern of latency—and will drive the need for solutions that can address all these challenges.
*Important note about lithium-ion batteries: Vertiv experts expect the lithium battery recycling infrastructure to expand in 2022 and remove one of the few remaining barriers to the widespread adoption of these batteries in the data center.
This Artificial intelligence is becoming a realityreal-time requirement is sensitive to latency. Furthermore, in the increasingly common hybrid model of enterprise, public and private clouds, colocation, and edge computing, full-time manual management is impractical, if not impossible. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be fundamental to optimizing the performance of these networks.
It will take time and attention to gather the right data, build the right models, and train the network platform to make the right decisions. However, programming tools have become simpler enough that data scientists can direct computing resources to a problem without needing to be experts in programming or hardware. The availability of AI hardware from established vendors, cloud options for AI, a simplified toolchain, and an educational focus on data science have made AI accessible even to smaller businesses. All of this is contributing to accelerating AI adoption in 2022.
As with all technological advancements, there are side effects. The growth of AI will inevitably increase computing and heat densities and, by extension, accelerate the adoption of liquid cooling. On the other hand, lower barriers to entry make choosing the right suppliers, platforms, and systems to rely on even more critical.
post -pandemic data center is taking shape: 2.9 gigawatts of new data centers are being built worldwide, up from 1.6 gigawatts in 2020 (Cushman & Wakefield). These data centers will be the first built specifically to meet the needs of a post-COVID world. The greatest activity will be concentrated at the edge, where VMware anticipates a dramatic shift in workload distribution: from 5% today to 30% in the next five years. Availability will remain the top priority, even at the edge, but lower latency is an increasing necessity 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, greater reliance on e-commerce and telehealth, video streaming) and the continued rollout of 5G.
- Moving Towards Integration: For years, various data center equipment vendors have been betting on integrated systems that allow for modular capacity addition, with integrated racks and rows among today's most popular data center offerings. In 2022, we will see the next step in integration as data centers work with vendors to better integrate larger systems—all components of the electrical 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 to larger systems brings speed. Rack-based power solutions are the first to accelerate the integration momentum.
