With their constantly whirring server fans and enormous cooling systems in cavernous buildings, data centers seem to be sucking up a lot of energy and contributing more than their fair share to climate change. But are they?

Dr. Eric Masanet and several colleagues decided to put it to the test. What they found is that, while demand for compute instances has gone up sixfold, the energy trend is close to flat.

With servers becoming more efficient and virtualization coming more into vogue, the data center has seen its energy per compute instance plummet.

“That has gone down by about 20 percent every year, and that pace of efficiency improvement is far greater than we can see in any other sector of the energy system,” Masanet said. “We wanted to point out that, even though the data center industry sometimes gets beaten up about its energy use or its contributions to climate change, that is really a remarkable energy improvement and better than nearly any other sector for which we have data.”

While the news is mostly positive for data centers, Masanet and his team also want to push for more data to be made available on data center energy consumption and sound a warning about major challenges on the horizon.

“We think there are three trends that really need to be better understood,” he said. “One is artificial intelligence, which should require a lot of computational intensity. The second is 5G, which could spur lots of new demand for data center services, and the third is edge computing, moving potentially some workloads and compute instances much closer to the end user in smaller data centers. We really don’t know yet how that’s going to play out from an energy perspective.”

The path certainly is not linear, but with progressive solutions, data centers can continue to be mindful about their energy use.

The United States' internet has been put to the test over the last six weeks, as almost the entire country has moved to streaming, learning and communicating from one wireless network.

This increase in data need begs the question - what will our Internet look like as we move into a connected future post-pandemic?

“Not Your Father’s Data Center” explores this question and how edge data centers fit into Internet architecture with guest Phillip Marangella, CMO at Edge Connects.

As data needs goes up, what happens to the backbone of our network? Marangella said it’s all about alleviating the bottlenecks, tackling latency and 're-architecting' the internet.”

Edge data centers fit into the architecture by delivering cloud computing and cached content from smaller facilities that exist closer to the end-user. Their proximity improves speed and user experience.

But edge data centers cannot operate as silos, Marangella said. The success of future connectivity relies on interoperability between bigger data centers, wireless carriers and data providers. Though 5G is a hot topic of late, Marangella points out that billions have been invested into 4G, and, for many situations, 4G is sufficient. The future of 4G rests in optimization, while 5G will tackle indispensable latency issues like those associated with self-driving cars or airplane flight data.

The future of a high-performing internet that meets global connectivity demands lies in the successful collaboration between 4G, 5G, data centers, data providers and wireless networks.

Pedro Matser started KyotoCooling some 15 years ago when he and his colleagues were asked by a data and telecommunications center in the Netherlands to find a more efficient process.

“We sat down with a group of people to come up with an energy-efficient solution,” Matser said on this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center.

He and his colleagues ran through their options, including traditional heat recovery, which is a popular strategy in Europe. Traditional heat recovery saves heat in winter by recovering heat.

“When I looked at these techniques, I found you could use these techniques for a data center,” he said. “You don’t want to bring the air from the data center outside and exchange it for fresh air.”

Instead, two loops are created, one outside-air loop and one inside loop to transfer free cooling.

“We found the results stunning – in [The Netherlands]," Matser said, "we could save 90% of the energy required to cool the data center.”

In this episode, Matser and Jamie Nickerson, head of electrical and mechanical engineering at HED, joined host Raymond Hawkins to talk about the Kyoto Wheel by Kyoto Cooling.

Nickerson explained how the Kyoto wheel works.

“When you think about a traditional office building, most often, there is a direct air-side economizer to save resources when the outside has specific cooler conditions than inside,” Nickerson said.

As an example, he noted that, when you place hot soup in the refrigerator, not only is the environment making the soup cooler, but the soup can make the air around it warmer.

“When you have a data center, you have a lot of equipment generating a lot of heat,” Nickerson said. “We push cooler air into the space, absorbing the heat, then the air stream needs to reject the heat to continue the cycle.”

On this episode of the Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, guests Buddy Rizer and Dave Liggett join host Raymond Hawkins to look ahead to 2020.

Rizer has been in the data center business since the beginning. Before he took the leap, Rizer took time to get to know the industry, then filled the data centers.

Rizer said that it was “such a new industry” that he was the only economic developer at trade shows. He also said that he was lucky to have investors and management “give him the budget and authority to get it done.”

On the topic of the industry’s inception, Rizer said that some entrepreneurs started in AOL and are still “driving the business which is exciting to us.” Dave Liggett said that it’s neat that Rizer has the perspective of where it started and where it’s going.

The conversation shifted toward the future and where the industry is headed in 2020. Being a capital intensive business, 2018 was a great year, but 2019 didn’t feel very good, and this had them worried a little.

The question came up: was it as bad as they thought? Liggett said that, in 2019, the industry players were “victims of their own success.” He said when investors see a great year, they ask, “How good can you do the next year?”

Fortunately, Liggett said he was “encouraged already for 2020 with the data we’re receiving.” The host said to keep some perspective, as “there aren't many 53% increase industries.”

Rizer then talked about the benefits and jobs that his data centers bring locally, turning the thought that data centers don’t bring jobs on its head.

Rizer predicted that, for the next east coast data centers, there is “still room to grow in Loudoun County, Virginia,” where he is located, or Atlanta and communities in Georgia.

He said that partnerships with power companies are key, and a distributed model could provide opportunities across the country and world.

Cloud computing appeared to experience a bit of a lull in the market in 2019. Raymond Hawkins, the host of Not Your Father’s Data Center and Chief Revenue Officer for Compass Datacenters, noted that the apparent 2019 lull came after a robust year in 2018.

There are two primary questions that come from this observation. Was there actually a lull? And what does 2020 look like?

Hawkins posed those questions to Ty Miller and Joe Goldsmith on a recent episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center.

Goldsmith said that he thinks the market volatility is regional.

First, he noted that he separates the corporate enterprise side of the business, because it is a bit more predictable. However, that is not the case for the cloud and service delivery portion of the market.

“[For] the folks that are making money with (cloud computing), it has been incredibly volatile,” he said. “I think that some providers are building out infrastructure hoping for more business, and there are some regions wherein they are so far behind the capacity curve, they’re scrambling to catch up. “

Miller said that he doesn’t think there was a lull at all.

He cited an example in Northern Virginia that may have looked like a lull. However, Ty noted that absorption was up from 2018, but was outpaced by supply.

He also echoed comments by Goldsmith regarding the hybrid enterprise portion of the business.

“Five years ago, you’d see a large enterprise deployment in the megawatt measurement range between 1 and 2, or even 5 megawatts,” Miller said. “Now, about 75% of that workload seems to be going to the cloud. Those are from entities who formerly procured as many as 5-times that amount.”

He said this speaks to massive growth.

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