The number of connected devices globally reached 14.5 billion in 2022. By the end of 2023, that number had grown 16% to surpass 16.7 billion active endpoints. The overall market is expected to increase by almost $700 billion by 2025, thanks to expanding urbanisation. There will be a surge in the number of smart city projects and an increase in government investment in digital networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT), which refers to the network of physical objects embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies, will remain a core consideration for organisations globally. This is especially true for those looking to connect more devices and exchange information with different devices and systems over the internet. As the volume of data produced by all these connected devices grows exponentially, storing and reliably accessing that data becomes increasingly important.
The cloud storage market is expected to grow to $137 billion by 2025. The surge in demand for low-cost data, faster accessibility, and various industries’ adoption of cloud storage are some factors fuelling the market’s rapid growth trends.
According to Gartner, 40% of newly procured premises-based computing power and storage will be consumed as a service by 2025, and 70% of organisations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency. Infrastructure is everywhere, and data centres continue to evolve to cater to hybrid cloud-based platforms, software-as-a-service offerings, digital ecosystems, and technology partners.
Calculating the environmental footprint
The data centre industry is ramping up the adoption and development of sustainable practices to limit the industry’s impact on the environment. This drive is encouraged by pressure from market regulators, investors, and customers. It is conducive to continuous innovation, epitomised by liquid cooling and using renewable energy to power data centres.
The sustainability of data centres has become a priority: facilities must be optimised, from design through to operation and throughout the lifecycle, by involving all stakeholders within the ecosystem. Data centres will constantly measure how they match up to their goals. However, even if they measure their environmental impact, everyone will need to use the same assessment criteria to make meaningful comparisons between facilities and operators.
Teraco is dedicated to powering, protecting, connecting, and growing the enterprises and ecosystems shaping Africa’s digital future sustainably and responsibly. Teraco’s protect, connect, grow strategy aligns our sustainability initiatives with the material issues impacting our business, clients, and communities. Our ambitions align with the seven United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) that are the most important to our strategy.
We continue to seek alternative energy solutions in pursuit of our renewable energy ambitions by:
- Maximising our rooftop solar PV coverage across all existing and newly built facilities.
- Investigating and engaging utility scale wheeled energy solutions from renewable energy sources.
- Evaluating and implementing alternative green energy offset mechanisms for our and our client’s energy consumption.
We have committed to powering our data centre colocation facilities with 50% renewable energy by 2027 and 100% by 2035. We have also maximised our combined rooftop solar footprint across all our facilities, which equates to roughly 80,000MWh in energy savings by the end of 2023.
Furthermore, we aimed to mitigate more than 8,500 tonnes of CO2 by the end of 2023 and have committed to diverting zero waste to landfills by 2028. Alongside the impact made through sustainable building and renewable energy sourcing initiatives, Teraco raised an R1.5 billion green loan in 2022 for its 200MW utility-scale solar programmes.
Sustainability
As businesses become increasingly aware of their impact and are urged to act quickly, data centres must also integrate sustainability into their strategies.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres account for 1% of the world’s electricity consumption. However, the workload of data centres between 2010 and 2020 increased six-fold, while the level of electricity production did not increase proportionally to these numbers.
However, future data centres are set to be even more environmentally friendly. The demand for data storage is not slowing down, but data centres will be expanding and improving their use of data compression, deduplication, and other efficiency-enhancing methods.
Air cooling, traditionally used to maintain the optimal operation of servers, consumes vast power resources. On the other hand, liquid cooling enables a rapid reduction in temperature and energy consumption and is often set up as a closed ecological cycle. Passively cooled systems with the latest technology (components that consume significantly less power and tolerate higher temperatures) will become significantly more predominant.
Data transmission and storage require significant power, and the industry’s standards for those power sources are changing. With an increased focus on environmental accountability, many large cloud companies are pouring their energies into adopting efficient, green power solutions.
Liquid cooling is gaining wider adoption
The data centre industry is finally poised for broader adoption of liquid cooling, and we anticipate significant strides in this direction in the next 12 to 18 months.
Several factors are prompting a reassessment of cooling, including powerful new hardware for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, growing pressure to stop using water resources for cooling servers, and major progress in enabling liquid cooling from cloud and colocation providers and server and chip vendors.
The biggest nudge comes from Microsoft, which has started using immersion-cooled servers in production. The company believes two-phase immersion promises major gains in server density and efficiency.
Microsoft isn’t alone. Multi-tenant data centre provider and Teraco investor Digital Realty is also preparing for broader use of liquid cooling. Digital Realty now offers liquid-cooled bare metal servers at its data centre in Singapore and an immersion lab in Ashburn.
Some believe edge computing will provide additional momentum for liquid cooling. New liquid-cooled architectures may emerge for the edge at scale. Whether that involves direct-to-chip liquid cooling or chassis-based immersive cooling is yet to be seen.
AI demand for computing power – and cooling
We’re quickly learning how much our dependence on artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI (GenAI), is poised to grow. AI is already interwoven into many aspects of our lives. According to research from Epoch AI, AI compute intensity doubles every six to ten months. While much focus has justifiably been placed on how AI will transform companies, careers, and communications, none of it is possible without the infrastructure built to meet the increasing demand.
Data centres and edge networks enable the magic that emerges from AI applications. They do so by using high-performance computing (HPC) clusters that require considerable power and, as a result, generate a lot of heat. Because of this data- and compute-intensive AI workload, the need for high-density infrastructure, led by high-density cooling and power, is emerging at a record rate.
HPC has changed our world virtually overnight, and the world’s critical digital infrastructure is tasked with keeping pace. Vertiv is among the companies focused on answering this challenge and leading by example, particularly where technology and sustainability intersect. This includes expanding the use of alternative energy, smart grids, hybrid grids and innovative data centre designs to deliver reliable solutions for customers while lessening the negative impacts on our planet.
At the same time, power demands of typical data centre computer racks are expected to increase from 5 kW to 7 kW today to 50 kW or more in the not-too-distant future.
As supercomputers continue to shrink and become more power-dense, our industry constantly thinks about how we keep them cool while concurrently tapping alternative power sources to support the increased energy demand. Several approaches are emerging.
Air cooling: One example is using rear-door heat exchangers in conjunction with air cooling. This solution can displace heat outside the servers.
Immersion cooling: This technology involves submerging servers and other components in a thermally conductive dielectric liquid or fluid.
Direct-to-chip liquid cooling: This process delivers cooling liquid through cold plates that lay atop the heat sources within the computers, drawing the heat away when the liquid circulates.
Moving forward, data centres will need to tightly orchestrate liquid and air cooling (a hybrid strategy) to optimise the overall environment within the facility.
AI’s potential is only as great as the world’s data centres’ capacity to support the computational intelligence required. The data centre industry must continue to evolve to provide the cooling and power solutions needed to support evolving data centre challenges and maximise AI’s true potential.
Colocation
As the expense of operating and maintaining on-premises data centres grows, enterprises are rethinking their infrastructure to optimise costs, operational efficiencies, and resilience. For this reason, the colocation market in Africa is steadily emerging as a favourable alternative.
Although most business leaders select colocation to address space, power, and cooling capacity challenges, they are often surprised to learn how colocation also improves connectivity and network performance.
Consistent, high-performing networks become a reality thanks to flexible, scalable connectivity options, always-on availability, direct connections to clouds and business partners, and a dedicated bandwidth approach where clients can modify bandwidth as needed.
Direct and private connectivity provided by colocation and interconnection ensures secure interactions. Moreover, colocation in certified environments mitigates risk by covering all the regulatory and compliance requirements for operators of sensitive infrastructures, including the finance sector, authorities, and healthcare.
Colocation facilities that offer carrier neutrality allow businesses to choose from multiple network service providers rather than being bound to one. This carrier neutrality enables clients to switch providers as required without moving IT equipment physically.
Direct connectivity to public cloud providers is another advantage of colocation. Private exchanges that serve as onramps into local and global cloud providers allow enterprises to connect to different clouds easily. The biggest drawcard of these services is that they bypass the public Internet, along with its unreliability and unpredictability.
Multiple connectivity options provide greater flexibility, allowing enterprises to build resilience in their operations. If the primary Internet service is disrupted, organisations can switch to a backup Internet service, ensuring always-on network availability.
Ordering new internet circuits from a carrier can take weeks. Enterprises can now get new services up and running faster by utilising readily available bandwidth at a colocation facility. This also presents an opportunity to modify bandwidth to meet changing network requirements, which helps clients react quickly and save money.
A vendor-neutral data centre – with interconnection to multiple clouds, partners, clients, and other service providers – presents a unique opportunity to efficiently integrate services and business processes efficiently, making collaborating easier and saving on network costs.
Enhance edge sustainability
The ability to reduce, reuse and recycle technologies will be an important consideration beyond 2023 as the adoption of edge computing grows. Edge deployments may be smaller than traditional data centres, but the scale and volume at which edge infrastructure is likely to be deployed demand that the environmental impact be minimised.
Building a sustainable edge at scale requires greater attention when selecting components and during the design and deployment stages and using comprehensive management systems to ensure efficient operation.
It’s no secret that data centre capacity needs to grow to support the new automated and digital world enabled by high-capacity networking technologies and Wi-Fi 6 transmitting the data. The key is to grow this capacity responsibly by focusing on sustainable solutions at the edge of the network, digitising the design and build phases of larger data centres, and implementing comprehensive metrics for sustainability.
Blockchain growth
It may be fashionable to remain sceptical about the real-world applications of blockchain technology. However, there’s an abundance of smart money and smart technology in play in this sector.
Supporting the belief that blockchain is reinventing the wheel, most NFTs and DeFi (decentralised finance) applications rely on traditional cloud and data centre infrastructure.
The security and resilience of stored data are among blockchain’s biggest advantages. Since a network of computers continually reconciles each block, one node failing will not bring down an entire system. This is especially relevant for the finance sector, which leads to the adoption of blockchain thanks to how efficiently the technology streamlines transaction processes.
Since data centres house massive amounts of data, the decentralised nature of blockchain removes some of the inherent risk of outages from natural disasters, built on top of redundancy already available at the data centre.
Blockchain data storage can offer greater security, reliability, redundancy, resilience, and transparency enabled by its distributed nature.
Blockchain also demands more reliable power, high-performance equipment capable of processing blocks of data quickly, and more intensive cooling to ensure equipment runs at optimal temperatures during peak workloads.
