Dcentralizing Data Center Power

Replacing a centralized electrical distribution system with a distributed power architecture sets up a facility to handle unexpected demand spikes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has radically changed the way people are using the digital infrastructure. The stay-at-home advisories and social distancing measures have increased the demand for a reliable internet speed.

Whole industries have moved vast numbers of employees to remote work. Internet providers are now improving network services that allow operations to continue with minimal disruption. According to an IEA report, between February and mid-April 2020, global internet traffic surged by 40 percent. Microsoft Teams saw a 70 percent increase in use for March alone. As the old year fades away, one thing is clear: getting back to the old normal is no longer possible. It has been replaced by a new normal. The cloud is considered essential and digital tools like video conferencing and virtual services like telehealth critical.

Mobile internet and social media have empowered people to become creators of data. Today, nearly 500 million photos are uploaded on Facebook and Instagram and roughly 500 thousand hours of video is uploaded to YouTube daily. More videos are uploaded to YouTube in one month than the three major US networks created in over 60 years. These figures give a view of the incredible amount of data that users generate on a regular basis.

Transferring all the data generated at the edge to the central cloud, processing and analyzing it on servers, and then transporting it back to edge devices is not feasible. Centralized cloud computing has two significant limitations in meeting the demands of a connected world: bandwidth and latency.

Using a central cloud bandwidth will be the choke point for the growth of IoT. Even if the network capacity increases to cope with the data, remote processing of data in the central cloud is inhibited due to latencies in the long-haul transmission of data. It is clear the need for a new computing model to cope with the hyper-connected world.

The impact of this digital transformation gives a broader set of challenges for data center operations.

•  How can data centers maintain resiliency, efficiency, and reliability amid the ever-growing demand for cloud-based, business-critical applications?
• How can data centers ensure their facilities are well prepared to scale operations in response to rapidly changing and continuously increasing capacity demands?

Facing these challenges requires that data center operators address the critical role power architectures play as enabling or limiting factors for expanding data center capacity.