Bjorn Viedge , General Manager , ALEC Data Center Solutions
ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Preparing datacentres for tomorrow ’ s workloads
Today ’ s highly scalable digital workloads are segmenting datacentres into air cooled and liquid cooled , opening opportunities for solution providers like ALEC Data Center Solutions .
The size , scale and operations of datacentres that carry digital networks and digital traffic for the digital economy are getting bigger , hotter , more expensive to operate and with a bigger and bigger carbon footprint . By 2025 , global datacentres will account for 20 % of the consumption of global electricity . Traditional building and cooling technologies cannot keep up with this growth in the scale of datacentre operations .
As an example , the amount of water that a typical datacentre consumes in two days is the same as an Olympic swimming pool . “ This is a very high resource consumption that is driven by the present state of cooling systems that use air ,” says Bjorn Viedge , General Manager , ALEC Data Centre Solutions .
Drivers of energy consumption
According to market research company Arizton , the UAE datacentre market is
According to available trends data , energy consumed by datacentres has soared from 0.4Kw per sqm in 2000 and before to 11Kw per sqm in 2020 .
expected to grow at a CAGR of close to 8 % from 2022 to 2027 and is expected to reach US $ 1.72 billion by 2027 from US $ 1.09 billion in 2021 . The United Arab Emirates is among the top datacentre markets in the Middle East .
The country has the presence of local and global operators such as Equinix , Gulf Data
Hub , and Etisalat , among others . The high internet and social media penetration across the country , deployment of 5G services and impressive inland connectivity make UAE an attractive market for investors .
So what is driving the relentless growth in energy consumption inside datacentres ? A good example is the comparison of social media applications that used to run in 60 seconds in 2018 versus 2021 .
• Tinder , grew from 1.1 million swipes per minute to 2 million
• WeChat , grew from 18 million text messages to 21 million
• WhatsApp , grew from 38 million messages sent out to 69 million messages
• Netflix , grew from 266,000 hours of viewing to 800,000 hours of viewing
• Ecommerce , grew from $ 0.9 million spending to $ 1.6 million
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