Future data centers: Both merged and scattered

Future data centers: Both merged and scattered

Data Centers are becoming more and more important in today's mobile Internet world. They store and process a large amount of consumer data and business data to support a large number of mobile applications, no difference is the cornerstone of many modern business models. Very large and ultra-large data centers have received much attention and have high energy efficiency, such as those large data centers running on Google, Amazon, and Facebook, however, the servers used by these data centers only account for about 5% of the total number of data center servers in the United States.

According to the recently released NRDC report, about 3 million other data centers in the United States store about 95% of the total servers in the country. In addition, these data centers include multi-tenant hosting facilities and internal data centers of enterprise organizations. According to the NRDC report, the servers in these intensive data centers only use 12% to 18% of the available capacity, resulting in serious waste of resources and low energy efficiency during operation.

The report estimates that, by 2020, the data center's energy consumption is expected to reach 140 KW, and the electricity cost will be as high as 13 billion US dollars. The report also estimates that power consumption is expected to be reduced by 40% if only half of the energy is saved through cost-efficient energy efficiency best practices. There are many technologies available to achieve this higher energy efficiency in data centers. These technologies include the use of physical to logical virtualization to improve utilization, as well as better performance and higher efficiency devices and new network architecture.

Another latest report from Emerson, a well-known Electronics Technology manufacturer, looked at data center professionals and the results seem to indicate that the future data center will focus on reducing centralization rather than strengthening centralization. In this survey, 58% of respondents predicted that by 2025, the data center would be half or smaller than the current facility. 31% of respondents are expected to have Internet exchange centers in neighboring areas by 2025. 68% believe that by 2025, at least 60% of computing will be based on the cloud.

This survey shows that in the future, a large and ultra-large data center will be more efficient, and a smaller data center can be embedded into neighboring areas, or even a high-speed network connected to people's homes. More and more local technical resources support a growing number of interconnected devices (often referred to as "Iot"), which may facilitate the development of local IT resources, including digital storage, in order to integrate and process the local data, and then transmit the data to the broader network."

To improve energy efficiency in distributed IT resources, we must develop new power-saving models for servers and other IT devices, as Emerson suggests. These modes must support quick response when needed, but enter the low-power or no-power mode when not needed. One way the server can do this is by using non-volatile memory instead of volatile memory in the processing unit.

Today, flash memory using a variety of interfaces (including DIMM sockets typically used for DRAM Memory) allows a certain amount of non-volatile memory in computer and server architectures, but in the future, the non-volatile memory architecture, such as the spin-transfer torque magnetic random memory (STTRAM), is expected to replace the internal cache memory in the processor and enable the function instantly without refreshing data. Switching from a volatile memory architecture to a non-volatile memory architecture will play a significant role in improving the energy efficiency of large and small data centers.

As we are increasingly dependent on cloud-based applications and other data center services, we need to improve data center efficiency. Merging resources provides a new way to improve efficiency and save costs-a major factor in reducing the cost of online storage. At the same time, the new non-volatile memory technology supports more efficient operations on a single server and provides more energy-saving modes. This is expected to increase local servers and IT resources to support connection, analysis, and use of more and more networked devices (IOT ). It can be said that in the future, the merger and decentralization will be shown.