Huawei conducted an online launch event on the 15th of January, releasing its Top 10 Trends of Data Center Facility for 2024. These trends reveal a future where safety and reliability are key priorities for data centres, rather than cost and efficiency.
Yao Quan, President of Huawei Data Center Facility Domain, noted during the online event that the future data centres should be characterised as 'reliable, simplified and sustainable'. Yao also outlined that these future projections are in line with a current global compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of AI computing power of over 80%, leading to the eventual progression from cloud data centres to cloud and intelligent computing data centres.
The global industry has seen a significant rise in data centre safety accidents in recent years. Data from the Uptime Institute indicates that losses exceeding US$100,000 due to interrupted data centre services have risen from 39% in 2019 to 71% in 2022. Yao highlighted how integral safety and reliability are to the data centre industry, emphasising that these factors should not be underestimated or underdeveloped.
High-reliability products and professional services were identified as the key to ensuring secure and reliable data centre operation. Distributed cooling architecture is seen as the preferred choice for ensuring cooling safety in future data centres. Predictive maintenance will also become a standard in data centre facility operation and maintenance.
The full-lifecycle network security protection system will serve as the protection shield of the data centre facility. Prefabricated and modular are identified as the optimal choice for high-quality and fast delivery, while a professional management platform will make the operation and maintenance of data centres more secure and efficient. According to Huawei, the convergence of air and liquid cooling is likely to become the preferred architecture in uncertain service requirements scenarios.
Indirect evaporative cooling remains the best refrigeration scheme currently and in the foreseeable future. To further reduce PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), there will likely be a shift in focus from efficient components to system engineering optimisation. In line with this, AI optimisation will be the best choice for intelligent energy efficiency optimisation of existing data centres.
Quan concluded that what roots are to a tree, infrastructure is to a data centre. Huawei will continue creating reliable, simplified, and sustainable data centre facility products and solutions to help customers and partners build green and reliable infrastructure for computing by enabling each watt to drive more computing power in efforts to power the digital world.