Picture it. The data intensive world of the future underpinned by campus upon campus of hyperscale data centre just to manage capacity demands. Is that some weird dystopian prediction or is it the future for hyperscale data centres?
Hyperscale facilities are recognised as data centres that are a minimum of 10,000 square feet in size, exceeding 5,000 servers and provide at least 40MW of IT capacity - typically serving enterprise customers.
Scale
From the smallest edge site to the larger colocation or multibuilding campus, hyperscale facilities are the biggest standalone site you can get. So, logic would dictate that the next iteration of data centre will continue to scale in a linear fashion to meet growing data demands.
Speaking to Darren Watkins, managing director for Virtus Data Centres, on what the next size of enterprise data centre facility will be after hyperscale, he says “the underlying digital economy is driving demand that is increasing in a linear way year-on-year. However, we now have an overlay of artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) deployments that are increasing demand further and faster in all geographies.
“Over the past few years, location has been a very specific and deliberate choice, but new AI / ML workloads are less latency sensitive and central metropolitan areas are often power constrained. This is opening up new locations as potential sites for data centres. The cost of setting up a facility is non-linear to the IT workloads that a location can support, so sites with scale and access.”
With a slightly different perspective, Terry Storrar, managing director, Leaseweb UK, believes that land scarcity and power requirements will hinder this linear growth in data centre size.
“Just as with any building project, the scale of data centres is dependent on suitable land and utilities to make a build viable,” he says.
“A worldwide shortage of available power will be a restriction on size. Despite rumours of some mega projects in Europe this year, it is unlikely that data centre size can continue on a linear trajectory in the longer term.”
Jon Healy, COO at Keysource says there are two sides to this question. The first is technology. As data centres are driven by the technology that's been deployed within them.
“As we start to see shifts in the type of compute and storage technology that's being adopted by users and service providers, then ultimately that's going to have an impact on sort of the data centre landscape, ” he says.
“We're now in a realm where people are assessing the types of technology that are being used based on the type of workloads that they're performing and starting to divide up those workloads, what technology best suits them, and therefore maybe what environments are those data centres that may be best suited to support that type of technology itself.”
The second part, according to Healy is the number of global resources that are available to accommodate these hyperscale data centres.
In line with Storrar's points around land and power scarcity, he believes there is likely to be more red tape added to protect these assets.
“It's going to become constrained, and I think geographically we're going to see a lot more protection of these resources in order for the data centre industry to use it,” he says.
“I think there's going to be a lot more local regulation coming in through things like planning application approvals and a higher standard of criteria, that if data centre providers are unable to meet they’re not going to be given the land and power to deliver their business.”
Differences
So, what do we expect the next iteration of hyperscale facility to look like and how will it differ from what we have?
Anthony Milovantsev, partner at Altman Solon, predicts that these facilities will be shaped by eight big trends of future innovation.
First, he says it will feature “specific and dedicated rooms as well as products with direct-to-chip or full immersion liquid cooling.
Second, it will have greater modularity, reducing time to market. Third, it will have cross-campus connectivity fabrics.
On the environmental side it will feature additional sustainability elements like rooftop solar panels.
Additionally, it will give back to the local ecosystems, e.g., waste heating pumped to the local cities and towns. It's also likely to have highly differentiated pricing and tiering, to cater to customers who don’t need traditional protections and latencies.
It will develop innovations for the edge such as data centres under towers, under skyscrapers, in parking lots ‘in a prolific fashion’, he says.
Lastly it will have new and futuristic features, like data centres underwater, quantum computers, even data centres on the moon! Although, he hastens to add that “these are still 3+ decades away”.
Sustainability
These new requirements Healy speaks of feeds into the sustainability part of the hyperscale data centre of the future because he believes “you will start to be evaluated, about how you're delivering these hyperscale or any type of data centre in a more sustainable way in order to obtain those resources”.
As we think about the power and cooling demand of this next iteration of data centre, we do wonder how it will work alongside sustainability requirements.
Shareef Alshinnawi, vice president of strategic accounts at Iceotope says that optimal efficiencies are the key to this conundrum.
“Between rising energy usage, increasing power costs and potential government regulations, pressure is on data centre operators to reduce the cooling system energy consumption of their facilities.”
“Alternative power and cooling technologies, like precision liquid cooling, are necessary to meet the growth in compute while reducing energy and natural resource consumption. Efficiencies in system and cooling design will have exponential benefits in reducing consumption given the scale of data centres and their infrastructure. These efficiencies transcend the entire spectrum of data centre implementation from supply chain, power/cooling infrastructure size, operations and end of life planning.”
Efficient power and cooling is not so straightforward in all types of facilities. Mark Grindey, CEO, Zeus Cloud, says “older data centres can be limited in terms of power and cooling, because it can be more expensive to upgrade old equipment, or they may not have the space and capacity to upgrade. If the data centre is old and wasn’t built with new technologies in mind.”
But all is not lost, data centres can still be sustainable as some operators “have opted to build solar farms or wind turbines to offset their carbon footprint and power usage, but not necessarily to power the data centre itself.
Another thing that data centres are doing in order to be more sustainable is recycling the air or water that they use to cool their data centre halls with.”
AI
We’re still at the early stages of AI, with only a small part of the population using it and the evolution of the technology still underway, so no one knows how big the capacity needs will be in the long term. Given the accelerating AI market, will hyperscale facilities be enough to meet short term future data demands? If so, for long?
“Hyperscale facilities can cope with AI for now, but the compute demands are skyrocketing,” says Pete Overell, founder and sales director at Panchaea.
“Data centres need access to hardware and hosting solutions to meet these demands in the medium and long-term. Forming strategic partnerships now will help deal with this challenge in the future.
Matt Rees, CTO of Neos Networks echoes these sentiments, saying: “I definitely see compute power growing exponentially as people start to leverage more and more AI capabilities.
“Therefore, you might start to see people swap out existing compute for more powerful devices. We for example continue to optimise our OpEx spend and large chunk of that can be rack space and power consumption in a commercial data centre. So how do we consume a small form factor but still enable us to provide the same, high capacity, high availability connectivity products to our customers.”
Spencer Lamb, CCO, Kao Data is a little more direct with this his position on this saying, “What’s clear is that today’s hyperscale facilities can in no way accommodate the increased growth of AI, and new data centres will undoubtedly need to be built to overcome the capacity shortages within the market.”
This, he says, is an issue that must be addressed at both an industry and governmental level. In the UK specifically, it will require us to look at how the country’s critical infrastructure is mapped and provisioned.
“Furthermore, data centres will need to be designed, and in some cases, modernised and redeveloped to accommodate high density computing, and secondary hubs will need to be established to increase the countries technological resilience and readiness for the next wave of AI, ”he adds.
Edge
With all this mind, coupled with the complexity and expense that comes with building data centres, one could question whether outside of edge environments, will we reach a point where anything smaller than a hyperscale facility is needed in the future?
Overall disagrees, saying “smaller data centres will be essential moving forward. They are a big enabler for hyperscalers to remain agile and flexible. Regional data processing is of major use, especially until hyperscale data centres become more viable in dense city settings. Being able to scale up and down with smaller facilities is incredibly beneficial.”
In addition, Grindey reminds us that smaller data centres are also needed for startup and small businesses and companies because they allow for businesses to deploy their own kit and guarantee security protocols and data policies are met.
“Despite smaller data centres being important, they may start to decline in the future, as they could struggle to keep up in terms of technology. So, we may only see mid sized data centres available for SMEs and co-location,” he says.
While none of us have a crystal ball, thanks to technologies like AI and Quantum, this next stage in data centre evolution promises to be interesting.
But what should we call this so called hyperscale 2.0 facility? Megascale, Terascale, Petascale, Exascale, Zettascale or even Yottascale as suggested by Kao’s Lamb? Me personally, I’ve got my money on Gigascale.
