Data Centers, Stage Center

As the world grows increasingly interconnected, the demand for data requires more storage solutions and robust processing power. While in the past the primary purpose of data centers was to simply store data, today computing power and network connectivity have become the most important purpose for these facilities. Data centers have become the cornerstone of the information economy.

DEMAND DRIVERS FOR DATA CONSUMPTION

The exploding demand for data is coming from three main categories of users: consumers, businesses, and emerging technologies.

As consumers, we are well aware of our reliance on data-dependent activity, whether we are messaging friends, ordering dinner, or watching a video on our phones. And the world is only going to get more dependent on data connectivity. By 2023, the number of global internet users is expected to soar to 5.3 billion—roughly two-thirds of the world’s population—up from 3.9 billion in 2018.[4] In addition to expanding access to social media and e-commerce, this connectivity will continue to allow consumers to move from a world of physical media (e.g., disks, print, and broadcast content) to on-demand services such as streaming music, movies, games, and more. And as the IoT becomes more ingrained in our lives, consumers will use even more data-intensive devices.

Technological advances are increasing the demand for low-latency and high-bandwidth data, driving the need to have computing power placed in close location to end users. As AI and virtual reality expand and continue to be applied to new applications, their data-intensive nature will require a higher level of processing power. Further down the road, other data-intensive technologies necessary for the expansion of edge computing (that is, a computing paradigm that stresses geographical proximity to high-demand usage locations) and autonomous vehicles and facilitated by 5G will also require a significant amount of low-latency connectivity.

PROCESSING AND STORING THE WORLD’S DATA

Data center tenants can be classified generally as enterprises, collocation providers, or cloud service providers. Enterprise tenants tend to be Fortune 100 companies with the resources to support their own dedicated facility. While these large companies may outsource certain data infrastructure needs, they often have propriety and mission critical systems that cannot be easily outsourced and require the security of their own dedicated facility.

Collocation providers are tenants that share a data center because of the economic efficiencies provided by the asset—similar to a coworking facility. Collocation providers also enable users to access a high-quality data center without having to make large capital investments. These users are generally small-to-medium businesses, or large enterprises that may need a satellite location for redundancy or disaster recovery purposes.

A cloud service provider allows its customers to convert physical technology assets into a subscription service. For these tenants, migrating data to the cloud creates a scalable platform with operating expenses more closely in line with utilization. The fastest growing segment of data center users are “hyperscale” tenants, the largest of the cloud service providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google), which generate significant economies of scale and provide an attractive alternative to a traditional enterprise facility.

A data center is built to store and process the data of its tenant in the most secure way possible, while providing maximum uptime. As a result, redundancy is built into every component, and there are typically multiple sources of power as well as backup power systems. In addition to the security of the facility, tenants consider many other factors, such as access to fiber connectivity, operational costs, and a low susceptibility to natural disasters. The proximity of the facility to the population it serves is becoming increasingly important, because latency—the time it takes to request, process, and return data—is becoming more problematic and disruptive as businesses and individuals rely on applications loading quickly. No one wants to see the dreaded “buffering” notification.

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