Identifying trends within large data sets is a key way of understanding what the data is telling you, and is critical to deciding what strategies to pursue in business going forward. In the data center industry, the growth of public cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM’s Softlayer is having a clear impact on the average power density of data centers and the IT racks located therein. Figure 1 is from one rack-level PDU vendor and it tells a clear story of how the IT industry is continuing to migrate towards more and more usage of three-phase power at the rack level. Also evident is a trend away from three-phase Delta and towards three-phase Wye adoption.
This article explores the fundamental differences between single-phase and three-phase power, why three-phase is more efficient, and why the data center designer should “ride the wave” by implementing three-phase power distribution in future deployments.