The UK Government has recently classed data centres as critical infrastructure, putting them in the same bracket as health and emergency services. So why are data centres so important and what changes could we see over the coming years with regards to this technology?
With over 170 data centres, London is the city with the highest demand for these facilities throughout all of Europe. London sits in third place globally for the total number of data centres, with only Beijing and North Virginia topping the total number of data centres built within the city.
London represents about 80% of the total data centre market in the UK and is the largest data centre hub in Europe—followed by Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin.
London, therefore, is a significant contributor to the UK tech boom, with this section of the economy expanding 2.6 times faster than the rest of the nation. However, there are still major challenges ahead if London is going to keep up with the rising demand for data centres within the capital.
Shortage of land availability—especially at a sustainable cost for businesses, lack of power grid capacity, and shortages in skilled labour may impact the growth of this market.
What is a Data Centre?
A data centre is a physical facility that houses a company's critical data and applications, and the computing infrastructure required to support them.
What is Contained in a Data Centre?
Data centres are designed around a network of computing and storage resources. Key components include routers, switches, firewalls, storage drives, servers, application-delivery controllers, network equipment, and other hardware.
What Does a Data Centre Actually Do?
Data centres collect, process, store, distribute and enable access to data and resources. They support business applications and activities like virtual desktops, communications, and collaboration services.
What are Data Centres Used For?
Data centres support large-scale applications, cloud computing, colocation, content delivery, and many other services vital to the UK economy.
How are Data Centres Evolving?
Modern data centres use technologies like virtualisation, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve efficiency, scalability, security, and availability.
Challenges of Data Centre Construction
The continued boom in technology-based industries and the subsequent demand for data and the infrastructure needed to store and process this data, presents major challenges for a number of reasons.
Apart from the obvious issues with land availability and lack of skilled labour to install these systems, there is a further issue with the amount of heat generated by a data centre when in operation, and the amount of electrical power needed to cool centres to stop them from overheating.
Highly efficient cooling systems and advances in water circulation methods show promise in reducing electricity demand, but perhaps we are looking at this issue in completely the wrong way and it needs to be somehow turned on its head.
Data Centres Built-in Office Buildings
With the lack of available space presenting a significant issue for the construction of data centres in London, architects are looking to radical new methods of processing and housing data within the city.
Mitch Clifton, senior designer at architecture firm Woods Bagot whose specialty is in complex infrastructure projects across multiple sectors, has proposed an inventive way to solve the problem of data centre growth and the lack of available space within London’s city centre.
His idea is to house new data centre processing equipment in office buildings and commercial spaces that are under-used and in many cases vacant as more companies shift towards cloud-based environments and move away from the typical office setup.
Clifton says that existing office buildings present an opportunity for data centre integration and conversion as they already have the necessary infrastructure in place for data centre operations.
Going One Step Further
Data centres produce a significant amount of heat, and this heat can be captured and reused for other purposes.
For every 1 MW of IT power used by servers, a data centre generates 1.3 MW of heat. This excess heat is normally dissipated into the air through cooling systems.
Reusing this heat can reduce energy use and carbon emissions. It can also help data centres become more sustainable and improve their relationship with the surrounding community.
Current Examples of Reusing the Heat
In Rjukan, Norway, a trout farm is powered by water heated from a nearby data centre. In Sweden, a study found that data centre waste heat could be used to supplement the heat for crops such as mushrooms and herbs.
Progressing Data Centre Design Innovation to Include Affordable Heating for Homes and Offices
In places such as Sweden, the cold climate means that agricultural industries can benefit from data centres heating up the earth and crops.
In the UK however, we have more of an acute problem in heating up our homes and businesses affordably.
With rising energy costs and an increased cost of living, many homes will go unheated this winter as families choose between heating and eating.
So why then are we struggling to heat up our homes whilst dissipating hot air away from data centres?
The heat produced by data centres could be used to heat nearby buildings, homes, offices, even swimming pools and production facilities.
This model would be made even more realistic if data centres were housed within existing office buildings and disused commercial spaces, as Clifton suggests.
For example, imagine an office in a London skyscraper that has its own mini data centre in the basement generating revenue for the business and also a free source of heating for the inhabitants of the building.
The heat from the data centre facility in an old office building could be diverted to heating the boiler in a residential property. In this way, the application of heat can be regulated and the mass of water in the boiler would cool the air being extracted from the data centre more efficiently as energy is taken out of the equation in order to heat up the tank of water.
In the winter you could essentially vent the excess heat from a data centre directly into the underfloor heating or the rooms themselves in a residential property.
By using the excess heat from a data centre to supply a central heating system or a boiler then the energy can be effectively stored and used when needed. So in the summertime, the delivery of heat can be regulated or used for purposes such as heating swimming pools or more seasonal activities.
Finding the Right London Data Centre for Your Business
We provide our clients with state-of-the-art data storage, processing, and security from high-end data centres, along with a range of cloud infrastructure and IT solutions to create the most streamlined and effective setup for your business.
One of the key advantages we provide our clients that help them to expand their business rapidly is unlimited data storage, that is available and accessible from any location or device.
Working within the cloud environment we can provide businesses with remote access to their data, along with the high-end computing power needed to process it, through the use of remote desktops and virtual workstations.
For more information on how this setup can work for your business and which options are most suitable within your industry, contact our expert advisors today and we will be more than happy to discuss how this technology can revolutionise your business.
