Speed to market, flexibility, and scalability have become mission-critical for hyperscale platforms and large enterprises when expanding or upgrading existing infrastructure.
Meteoric growth and unprecedented scalability demands are outpacing what high capacity data center customers, such as cloud and platform providers and enterprise organizations, want to produce in their own facilities. Moreover, when expanding into existing or new markets, predicting usage and growth models is becoming a complex endeavor fraught with a variety of bottom line risk factors for these organizations.
To solve for this, some companies roll the dice and over-provision, thus increasing CapEx and OpEx. Meanwhile, others may simply be unable to build or obtain data center capacity quickly enough, where and when they need it, thus hamstringing new revenue-generating initiatives. Another challenge these organizations face is that compute loads are becoming more dynamic since capacity demand can vary quarterly or even project by project.
Lastly, but certainly not least, these high capacity customers are affected by the challenge of fulfilling environmental and sustainability mandates — a good thing, to be sure, given the industry’s shared responsibility to become better stewards of the planet. According to a recent study by Dell EMC, the data center industry is consuming 200 terawatt-hours of power each year, the equivalent of one-tenth of the total energy usage worldwide. But it’s not just the tech behemoths that are consuming so much energy; it’s not uncommon for a single data center serving a large enterprise to use the same amount of electricity as a small town.
The good news is that an IHS Markit survey found that internally these organizations are increasingly driven by potential energy cost savings or sustainability policies, while externally they are more and more motivated by their customers’ desire for doing business with companies that have environmentally friendly practices. Additionally, the pursuit of tax incentives and subsidies from governments that proffer a carrot not a stick has become a motivating influence.
