Trend 2: The evolution of data centers will accelerate the adoption of alternative backup technologies

As a backup power source for long delays (such as 24 hours), diesel generators have always been the first choice for data centers due to their high reliability. However, with the emergence of environmental problems, more and more people hope that they can be replaced with more sustainable solutions. However, Schneider Electric research found that if the investment cost, fuel cost, carbon emissions, availability and other dimensions of a comprehensive balance, there is no ideal alternative. These alternatives also require further reductions in investment costs and fuel costs to make backup power economical. But at the same time, with the continuous improvement of grid power supply stability and IT system resilience, the requirement for backup power delay is significantly reduced (for example, most grid outages are less than 2 hours). In addition, the adoption of distributed energy sources such as wind storage provides more opportunities to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions through dynamic responses between data centers and the grid. The traditional distribution architecture that relies on firewood and UPS to provide high-quality power for critical loads is evolving into energy storage systems. Schneider Electric’s latest research finds that the evolution of these three data centers will make lithium battery energy storage or hydrogen fuel cell technology more competitive, thereby promoting its adoption by the industry as an alternative to firewood. In the future, the data center energy landscape will be more diversified, and backup power solutions, grid services, and distribution architectures will have greater imagination and development space.

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Trend 3: Multi-access edge Computing (MEC) will emerge at the network edge

To support data-intensive and ultra-low latency applications such as HD streaming, autonomous vehicles, automated mining, and Industry 4.0, we must place compute and storage resources at the edge of the network to ensure that these resources are closer to the data source or data consumer, thereby eliminating latency from centralized core cloud data centers or regional edge data centers to edge devices. In addition, there is also a need for faster network communication between data centers at the network edge and edge devices, such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6. In the past, the telecom industry and the IT industry have been evolving along their respective technological routes, such as the traditional telecom network cloud, distributed cloud computing data centers as an extension of the IT cloud. Today, we are seeing the capabilities of distributed cloud and traditional telecom data centers converge at the network edge into multi-access edge computing (MEC) data centers. In the future, telecom base stations can also provide software-defined services (such as network function virtualization); The distributed cloud will also have telecom control functions. Schneider Electric believes that MEC will enable digital transformation (such as smart cities, smart manufacturing), but its large-scale deployment also presents unique challenges for power distribution, cooling, energy efficiency, management, and maintenance. In addition to meeting the goals of resilience and performance, operators must also embrace sustainability as a core value in order to minimize energy use, carbon emissions and waste generation.