Data centers are fundamental for the success of retail companies and other businesses. As technology advances and workloads expand, enterprises need more granular, real-time data to ensure their operations not only run efficiently, but remain competent and operational in spite of cyber and outage threats. AI and machine learning can help identify how existing data centers can be modernized to become more responsive, less rigid, and overall more reliable.
By utilizing AI and ML, data center operators can drastically improve performance and reduce costs while optimizing configuration and deployments. All while 50% of IT subjects in data centers will operate through embedded AI by 2023. One of the main goals is to identify the root cause of outages, be it on-premises or cloud-based. To reduce outages, strengthen multi-site resilience, optimize direct liquid cooling and improve capacity planning and security, AI and ML have been identified as the ideal solutions.
Moreover, AI is fundamental to optimize power consumption and enhance the power usage effectiveness (PUE) for future efficiency gains. A key approach in zero trust enterprise security is “Never trust, always verify”, which in effect, does not trust any user, application or device until explicitly allowed by a security policy.
Equinix, a major global provider of data center services and network infrastructure, is already utilizing AI to estimate how much space and power their data centers require. With AI, CIOs can reduce energy costs and increase energy efficiency, a critical goal for many businesses. As far as sustainability is concerned, AI and ML are essential for carbon footprint reduction, and CIOs are seeing more compensation plans indexed to ESG targets.
Furthermore, AI can aid in the prevention of data breaches and hacks, and predict when a certain server requires maintenance. Using real-time data, AI is able to track performance over time and recognize when and where optimizations can be made to improve efficiency. Hopefully with AI and ML, an autonomously operated data center may soon be a reality.
The company mentioned in this article is Equinix, a global provider of data centers services and network infrastructure for large enterprises. It has more than 220 data centers in 26 countries, and uses AI to improve power and space consumption within their data centers.
The person mentioned in this article is Wendy Zhao, who is senior director and principal engineer at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. She has been working on using AI and ML to aid data center operations and IT management, and states that AI and ML should have tangible impacts on data center performance.
