Welcome to Data Center 2025
An industry-wide initiative, spearheaded by Emerson Network Power,to create a vision—or multiple visions—of the future of the data center.As part of Data Center 2025, Emerson has conducted interviews with key industry influencers, solicited feedback from the industry at the Data Center 2025 online portal: EmersonNetworkPower.com/DataCenter2025,and conducted an online survey that generated more than 800 responses.
The year 2025, eleven years from the writing of this report, represents a horizon that is close enough to project how current trends could play out—the data centers being commissioned today will be at the halfway point in their projected lifecycle in 2025—and yet far enough away that there is still opportunity to shape what that future will look like.
As you review the Data Center 2025 findings, you may be struck by the optimism of the participants in some areas. From use of renewable energy to power density to sophisticated management tools, participants set a high bar for the future. In some cases their projections are so optimistic they seem almost impossible when compared to the current state.
But those projections begin to make sense when you consider that innovation has always been the engine that drives IT. It is impossible to predict exactly what those innovations might look like, what disruptive technologies might emerge in the next ten plus years, but for the most part participants in the study have faith that they are coming.
And that bodes well for the future of our industry.
Looking Back to Look Ahead
The year 2025 is 11 years from the release of this study. If we look back 11 years to 2003, the data center industry was just starting to emerge from the dot-com bust. There was a surplus of data center capacity, rack densities were in the 250 W to 1.5 kW range, and the broadband and social media revolutions hadn’t yet made their presence felt.
A lot has changed since then
The years 2003 to 2008 would be marked by steady growth in the demand for computing and storage as virtually every industry became more digitally dependent.This created a massive ramp-up in data center capacity.New servers were added weekly in some facilities, and each generation of servers eclipsed the previous in power density. More and more computing was consolidated in the data center, and data centers themselves were being consolidated to simplify management and reduce costs. Organizations scrambled to keep up with capacity demands and data centers became increasingly heterogeneous and complex.
By 2006, rack densities had reached 6 kW on average,according to the Data Center Users Group（DCUG）sponsored by Emerson Network Power. Suddenly data center managers were battling hot spots and
cooling was limiting the ability of many data centers to add needed capacity. Heat density was named the top infrastructure concern by DCUG members in 2007, 2008 and 2009 （Figure 1）。
Figure 1.Top data center infrastructure concerns from 2007 to 2013 as expressed by members of the Data Center Users Group. Heat density was the top concern in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
The growth in capacity and density led to an additional concern: energy efficiency. Prior to 2007,energy costs were a non-factor in most IT budgets. Few organizations even bothered to separately meter their data centers, limiting visibility into rising consumption. Data center managers were laser - focused on maintaining the highest possible availability . If that meant keeping the data center 10 degrees colder than necessary, or reserving 20 percent of capacity as a buffer against accidentally overloading resources, those were sacrifices that were willingly made.
But with energy prices and consumption rising simultaneously and environmental concerns growing, the industry could no longer afford to ignore energy consumption. More efficient power and cooling technologies were introduced, best practices were adopted more widely, and IT organizations increasingly began to seek out and decommission unproductive servers in a battle against sprawl.
Most significantly, virtualization broke the connection between applications and physical servers, allowing greater management flexibility and higher server utilization rates. As Emerson’s Energy Logic, released in 2007, documented, the most impactful approach to data center energy efficiency is to increase the efficiency of the IT systems that performed the work of the data center,thereby creating a cascade effect that reduces consumption across all supporting systems. By increasing server utilization, virtualization has the potential to increase server efficiency and reduce erall data center energy consumption.
Not surprisingly, virtualization contributed the highest percentage of energy savings in the Energy Logic model.
While virtualization was breaking down the walls between servers, the distinction between voice and data networks was also blurring. Adoption of voice-over-IP continued to grow-according to a Frost and Sullivan study,less than 25 percent of businesses were still analog telecommunications systems in 2013—as businesses and individuals opted to put all of their packets into the IP basket.
Most recently, the industry has seen a new class ofdata centers emerge: hyperscale facilities. These mega facilities are being built by Internet-based businesses, such as Facebook as well as software-as-a-service and cloud providers. With a high priori on keeping costs down and ensuring scalability, hyperscale data centers are driving increased focus hardware standardization, infrastructure innovation and modular expansion.
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