THE AFCOM CHAPTER AWARD WINNERS 2020 had some amazing contributions of individuals and local AFCOM chapters who rose above to continue to advance the data center industry and keep AFCOM communities connected. Alicia Schap, AFCOM’s association manager, announced the winners at Data Center World in Orlando last week. The Volunteer of the Year Award recognizes a member whose membership, and local and national contributions and involvement, have made a… Read More
Can AI solve the data center labor shortage?
As data centers get smarter, the workforces running them are struggling to keep up. While the industrywide ideal is for so-called dark data centers — meaning, centers without any on-site staff — this brave new reality, for the moment, is still aspirational and years away. In fact, industry leaders say the flood of information coming from smart equipment and sensors needed for artificial intelligence and automation created a widespread need for employees capable of actually… Read More
5 Reasons Cloud Repatriation Should Be Part of Digital Transformation
If you were charting a digital transformation strategy five or 10 years ago, there is a very good chance that migrating to the cloud was at the heart of it. Today, however, the vast majority of businesses are already in the cloud–and it’s not always working out the way they intended. To continue along the digital transformation journey, forward-thinking organizations might want to consider cloud repatriation. By repatriating cloud workloads,… Read More
How Data Centers Will Be Impacted By Microsoft’s 2030 Carbon-Free Energy Plan
Taking another climate moonshot, Microsoft has set out to crack a problem that will require a complete rethink of the world’s electric grids. Microsoft has made another big climate pledge. The company recently stated that it will work to power all its offices and data centers around the world with carbon-free energy 100 percent of the time by 2030. This is a very different – and much larger – problem… Read More
How Data Centers are Breathing Life into Abandoned Buildings
The trend in data center construction has been to construct an entirely new building, designed to meet all kinds of demands, like maximum power and air conditioning efficiency. But alongside these greenfield developments, there have been some creative exceptions to the rule: old, abandoned structures which are given a new, modern life. Over the last few years, there has been an effort to convert abandoned buildings in densely populated urban… Read More
AI for data center cooling: More than a pipe dream
Today, artificial intelligence can be found all around the data center – helping manage and protect the network, filtering alerts, and moving workloads. However, the industry has been slow to apply AI to the problems of operational technology, rather than IT. And specifically, to the realm of the data center cooling system, sometimes responsible for as much as a third of the overall power consumption of a server farm. You… Read More
When Will Liquid Immersion Cooling for Data Centers Become Mainstream?
Microsoft’s Tiny Data Center Liquid Cooling Experiment Is a Big Deal. It’s even bigger than that time its researchers sunk a submarine-like data center in the ocean. It’s running production workloads. But the rack of servers submerged in engineered fluid inside a Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, is still somewhat of a science project, similar in its purpose to Project Natick, the hermetically sealed computer-filled capsule the company’s R&D… Read More
Why is Cloud Repatriation Happening?
More and more organizations who went all-in on cloud early are now finding that some analytics workloads are better on-premises and are pulling those workloads back. There’s a popular notion that all analytics workloads are headed to the cloud, and if an organization’s workload isn’t in the cloud yet, they’re lagging behind. There are certainly some situations where moving analytics workloads to the cloud makes sense, but cloud isn’t the… Read More
7 Colocation Trends to Watch in 2021
Customers with legacy workloads and stringent compliance requirements are making colocation a component of their IT strategies, alongside cloud. Cloud repatriation, for example, is landing workloads in colocation provider’s data centers. In addition, colocation has become a springboard to the cloud for customers who want to move IT assets off site but aren’t quite ready to commit to public cloud platforms. Colocation is also getting a boost from edge… Read More
The Future of Data Centers in a Post Covid-19 World
Not since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has the world experienced such a profound public health crisis leading to transformational economic and social dislocation. The measures taken to suppress the virus have almost brought the global economy to a shuddering halt and affected many aspects of individuals and business’ daily lives. It has also made us all aware of the sheer importance of the Internet and web-enabled personal and business… Read More