The Impact of Increased Power Demand In Data Centers

Demands on data centers are growing with each passing day. When you add in the soaring cost of real estate, the result is that data centers are getting creative and adapting to create higher rack densities for future planning. To drive this point home, one only needs to look at power consumption over the past three years, particularly in emerging markets. This gives a better sense of power densities and capacity planning as it relates to the global growth of data centers. 

And the pace isn’t expected to start flagging anytime soon – predictions show power consumption only growing through the end of 2016 and into 2017, according to DCD Intelligence. Naturally, this is putting a strain on data center operators and customers to seek out ways to use space and power more efficiently. And, because power and space aren’t exactly expendable factors, we’re starting to see more modularity and flexibility being built into data centers, including equipment racks that set the stage to take on a variety of future workloads.

Take a look at the graph from DCD, which shows the projected global data center power requirement growing over time, and well into next year. Despite some moderate slowing in the United States, which is the world’s most advanced market, DCD still predicts sustained growth globally. After tracking the growth of data centers for the past decade, DCD now predicts 51.7 GW of power will be drawn in 2017. This, despite rapid adoption of technologies such as power optimization, virtualization and per watt computing efficiency improvements. 

As your Power Strategy Experts, the power professionals at Server Technology are constantly thinking of ways to improve your power efficiency. To learn more, take a look at some of our solutions for power monitoring and management, understanding your data center’s power usage, realizing power savings and putting a stop to vampire servers that are silently sucking up your data center’s power supply.