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Data Centre Lifecycle
The data centre construction market is set to grow considerably – potentially quadrupling by 2028, according to research by Barbour ABI.
These highly complex projects involve long and unpredictable lead times, a specialised workforce that can be difficult to find and bespoke product solutions. Each of these factors can impact the completion date and every day of delay can mean up to £800,000 in lost income. Avoiding any interruption is critical.
Here, Dan Evets, vice president of strategic accounts at project management software provider ALICE Technologies, explains how AI software can help bring these projects to completion faster than ever before.
A Renewable Approach
The UK Government has classified data centres as a critical part of national infrastructure. It is easy to see why. AI-powered software tools and cloud-based computing are fuelling the demand; essentially, the more data we create and need to stream, the more storage capacity is required.
As data centres grow in number and size globally, their energy use and environmental impact will be significant. The more data they process, the more energy consumption and processing power are required. This generates more heat, which can damage equipment or create a fire risk. To keep the site cool, more energy is needed to maintain ambient temperatures, adding to the ever-increasing energy demand. If we are to deliver and operate these sustainably, decisions need to be made up front.
Beyond the sustainability issues, there is another challenge. The quantity of electricity used by our future data centres cannot be maintained with our current grid system. This will increase the risk of unexpected downtime, national power shortages and significant logistical issues if ignored.
To combat this, data centre owners are starting to look at off-grid, renewable energy sources that can power and cool their data centres. Solar, water and even nuclear power sources are being considered, even before a site has been purchased. These too, need to be considered as part of the highly complicated chain of decisions needed to deliver these projects effectively.
New Build and Retrofit
Data centres commonly span a large area and require a range of expertise to be constructed. People aren’t intentionally inefficient in their work patterns, but on a complex data centre site, it can be challenging to use everyone as efficiently as possible. There are millions, if not billions, of project management possibilities, so finding the most effective solution can appear to be an impossible task.
Data centre construction used to take 18 months, but it now averages eight to ten months from start to completion. This faster delivery is helping to increase the gap between refurbishments. Any further efficiencies on this will bring additional financial gains that are worth finding.
The need for speed extends to existing assets too. Unfortunately, data centres are quickly becoming the fastest-depreciating asset in history. By the time a site is completed, technology advancements will mean it needs to be upgraded in a few years.
As a result, the data centre industry needs trillions of pounds of refurbishment spending over the next five years to ensure growing demand is met and efficiency, and ultimately profitability, are as high as possible.
To reduce timescales, data centre owners are turning to technology to help them manage projects and remove risk. AI-powered scheduling tools like ALICE Technologies help clients to understand the cost and time implications of decisions and make more informed choices.
Improving Efficiency
With ALICE, users upload an existing baseline schedule from Oracle Primavera P6, P6 cloud or Microsoft Project, reducing the amount of scheduling information that needs to be entered manually. Users can use software to run AI-powered 'what-if' analyses to optimise their uploaded programme or model for cost, time, resource idle time, reducing resource peaks, or other objectives. It will rapidly simulate these scenarios to generate multiple feasible schedules based on the project’s optimisation goals.
The benefit of all this work is that the approaches, optimum schedules and agreed risk management strategy can be taken forward for use in the construction of future data centres. With many projects sharing similar approaches, project management software helps owners to build consistently, saving them time and money.
Learn more about optimising your data centre construction process on the ALICE Technologies website https://www.alicetechnologies.com/home.
