DCD Magazine #51
>>CONTENTS
Navigating the AI frontier: Balancing data center evolution with AI revolution Advertorial: Ensuring data center excellence amidst the AI surge, says Align
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t’s hard to escape the endless talk of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) right now. While many buzz phrases come and go, there’s little doubt that AI puts us on the cusp of one of the most significant changes that society has ever faced – it will change the way we work and play alike, and most importantly, it’s here to stay. What that means for the data center is a one-two punch – it vastly increases the capacity the industry will need to offer and introduces the challenge of supporting new AIcapable infrastructure in older facilities. Align has been working in the industry for over 36 years, offering complete lifecycle services from the data center to the desktop. Their data center services include strategy, design/build, migration, decommission, and refresh, while meeting the ever-present need for expansion and consolidation of existing facilities. Who better, then, to discuss the oncoming advances in AI in the data center industry? We sat down with some of Align’s key stakeholders – Tom Weber, managing director for Data Center Solutions; Rodney Willis, managing director for business development, Data Center
Solutions; Simon Eventov, assistant director for Data Center Design & Build, and Tyler Miller, regional director of Data Center Sales, Texas. The first stop in our exploration is an analysis by Tom Weber of why the AI revolution, alongside other high-compute applications, is not just leading to exponential growth in data center construction, but also the consolidation of existing facilities to increase capacity. “In three to five years, we've gone from cabinets running at five, eight, or 10kW and now we commonly see 40kW and beyond, and it is driven by the gear and the more powerful application that is running on it. This may be elementary, but it's denser loads and smaller spaces, which create issues, because in the old days, we would have a megawatt covering 10,000 square feet, in the past few years, it's six megawatts and maybe 15,000 square feet.” “Now we're seeing companies running a 10,000 square foot space capable of running a megawatt and not even a tenth of the space is being used. So, we have an open hockey rink with 20 cabinets in a checkerboard configuration that are all running 50kW.” “One of the big challenges is fitting all that
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power into a cabinet and how you get cooling to that cabinet. You're not just blowing cold air in the front anymore. The biggest thing we see from a physical layer is fitting more into a smaller space and there are pros and cons to that.” “Getting direct cooling at the cabinet level is a huge challenge. Tapping into existing cooling infrastructure often requires shutting down a portion of that infrastructure, which typically supports other critical customers that cannot afford any downtime. This is a real problem when trying to convert a portion of an existing facility to support these higher densities. Today, new builds and retrofits have started including cooling designs to better incorporate standard cooling technologies with the ability to provide direct cooling to areas that require it.” Simon Eventov added: "There will be specific segments, particularly in highcompute tasks, that will remain essential. A prime illustration of this is autonomous vehicles, where proximity is crucial. There will also be a vast volume of data, continuous learning, and outcomes that can be distributed across diverse locations.”