Computing technology and equipment continuously advance, yet the infrastructure that supports data centers generally lag behind. As a result, data centers are inflexible and ill-equipped to adapt quickly to technological innovations; leaving them struggling to keep up with current demands of the business and unable to plan effectively to meet future demand.
Power is a key element of that intrinsically static infrastructure. It represents 10% of a data center’s operating costs and is expected to grow to 15% by 2021, accorind to Gartner. The cost of power and demand charges are increasing in part because of expanding demand from the adoption of innovative technologies like AI, virtual reality (VR), the IoT, data analytics, and other commercial high-performance computing. These applications require more powerful and energy-intensive servers to deliver the kind of performance that end-users expect. In many cases, this increased power load from servers pushes the total power requirements for the data center to the limit of the available electric service coming into the building.