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Efficiency Is The Name Of Game – Staying Ahead Of The Curve In Buoyant Data Centre Market

By Viktar Zaitsau, Operations Director – Asset Management at Tetra Tech.

The Data Centre industry (DC) is booming, and Covid-19 has clearly accelerated some of the brewing developments in the Facilities Management (FM) of DCs, particularly relating to the advancement of technology and the technical development of personnel to reduce staffing levels.

Business estates and facilities management providers were forcefully pushed by the pandemic to operate in a non-overlapping shift pattern and at a reduced level of employees. Notably, however, the rate of outages did not increase. More and more tasks had to be completed off site, utilising various remote facilities management tools, technologies and methodologies.

The pandemic has forced the FM industry to start adopting technologies leading to predictive maintenance, with a number of reputable and new companies rushing to develop existing tools, such as BMS and CAFM to give their clients analytics on reactive break-fixes, forward works and forward maintenance analytics.

Sustainability Motivation

Net Zero is another important driver in the advancement of DCs. In my assessment, existing stock of DCs are 30 to 100% less energy efficient than the new ones, which have just been built by the hyperscalers (cloud providers and absolute leaders in the area of energy efficiency). DCs that are over ten years old operate at PUE estimated as high as 2.4, with new DCs operating at around 1.2 PUE.

It is such an overwhelming contrast.

Companies going off premises with their IT infrastructure and moving towards cloud have a variety of options. However, they also have their own sustainability targets. As such, organisations should look to impose their energy efficiency and carbon targets on cloud providing companies, and not just requiring them to sign up for the Terabyte of data used – an incredibly simplistic payment mechanism and performance matrix.

The structure of the industry is that more often than not, cloud providers and large enterprises lease the space off the co-location (co-lo) providers, as they cannot build their own data centres fast enough to pick up with the ever-growing demand in data. Therefore, companies should impose efficiency onto co-lo providers (ask for PUE 1.6-1.8 or below). Ultimately, service users pay for the energy bills, so unless asked, co-lo providers have very little interest in having energy efficient facilities.

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Challenges In Asset Management

The DC market is changing and presents both a new challenge and risk, particularly with co-lo and hyperscalers facing the new challenge of the asset upgrades and refurbishment of the existing DCs. With some DCs transacting billions of pounds worth of transactions per day, they are in the similar positions and face similar challenges. These challenges include:

• Delivering complex infrastructure and asset upgrade in the existing data centres keeping the uptime
• Obtaining best analysis regarding the risk criticality, timing of replacement, sequence and delivery methodologies
• Overlapping and better engaging multiple stakeholders including sustainability, compliance, finance, security, ICT and achieving an alignment on the extract project scope, performance outputs, impact on the business continuity, and impact on SLAs with the tenants and FM providers

There is a gap in the capability to effectively deliver asset upgrade programmes in the existing facilities. Due to this, there might be tendency to react, break-fix and to manage the estate by exception.

Estates and facilities are strongly advised to think about their real estate and asset management strategies and vision, start with the policy and make sure it is aligned and, more importantly, support the overall organisational strategy. They can then work through building up the roadmap and 10–15-year asset management plans, looking at it holistically (CAPEX/OPEX/carbon), aligning procurement strategy, thinking of people and other resources as assets, whilst forming the delivery execution plans.

Lots of smaller (up to 10 MW) existing sites operate at 30-50 capacity. Their biggest challenge is the demand for the space that comes from cloud providers, who generally demand 10 MW+ capacity and expect it to be deployed in 3-6 months! A lot of co-lo providers realise that for business continuity, they have to invest and secure, perhaps, unexpected funding from the investors.

Looking Ahead

With the world converging, the DC market finds itself pulled into the rapid development of technologies and Net Zero pressures, meaning that successful investors, developers and operators must innovate and stay agile with their strategies and execution.

Cloud providers are under fearless pressures of commoditisation and are increasingly starting to leverage their whole value chain, including DC design, build and operation, to create better and additional value to the cloud users. The most successful of these, once realising the dynamics they are finding themselves in, have started to invest heavily in developing new competencies to stay in the game and not to be consumed.