Part of an ongoing effort to increase interest in the data center industry, 7X24 International invites students from around the world to attend its annual meetings. A student session was held June 3 at the Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek Resort, the opening day of the 7x24 2018 Spring Conference.
The agenda consisted of five presentations from industry leaders: Rich Garrison, AlfaTech; Martin Gollwitzer, Gensler; Tim Campbell, Syska Hennessy Group; Michael Swetz, State Street Corp.; and Dennis Cronin, Resilient Solutions.
The first of a series of reports from the 7X24 student presentation begins with Rich Garrison who emphasized the definition and the demands placed upon today’s data centers.
“What is a data center? It is a purpose-built facility to house computing, storage, and network equipment. It is designed to meet capacity and reliability needs, and it allows companies to deliver applications to their customers and endusers,” he said. With regard to the amount of data moving through our world at break-neck speeds, Garrison said that the following all occur within one second: 40,000 Google search queries, 600 Amazon sales, 10 iPhones sales, 850 Apple downloads, 521,000 messages on FaceBook, 46,000 videos viewed on FaceBook, and five hours of video uploaded to YouTube. Every second.
According to Garrison, the future will only speed up. “By the end of 2017 it was reported that nearly 80% of photos were taken on smart phones, and up to 1 trillion photos were shared online. More data has been created in the last two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. By 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human on the planet. By 2020, our accumulated digital universe of data will grow from 4.4 zettabytes today to around 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. By 2020, over 50 billion smart devices will exist to collect, analyze, and share data,” said Garrison.
Emphasizing the need for more people to enter the data center workforce, Garrison said, “Today there are over 7,500 data centers worldwide. Latest figures show construction was predicted to grow 21% per year through 2018, and by 2020, at least one-third of all data will pass through the cloud.”
Fun Facts
- The largest data center in the world in Langfang, China is 6.3 millions square feet, nearly the size of the Pentagon.
- California as the largest concentration of data centers in the United States with more than 300 locations.
- By 2020, nearly 8% of all new data centers will be powered by green energy.
For more information on the 7x24 Exchange International conferences and organization, visit www.7x24exchange.org
