Data center operators and suppliers will be more aggressive in pursuing strategies that can make a real difference in addressing the climate crisis.

Lithium battery recycling infrastructure is expected to expand in 2022, removing one of the few remaining barriers to widespread lithium-ion battery adoption in data centers.

In 2020 alone, each person created approximately 1.7mb of data per second. On top of that, a whopping 90% of the world's data was created in the past two years alone. In short, data center and IT energy usage will only continue to rise—ultimately accelerating the growth of green data centers.

Global digital infrastructure and continuity solutions provider Vertiv also highlighted a significant acceleration in action on sustainability and the climate crisis in its recently published annual list of key data center trends to watch in 2022. "As we move into 2022, data center operators and suppliers will aggressively pursue strategies that can make a real difference in addressing the climate crisis," said Vertiv CEO Rob Johnson.

Now, we look at the data center trends experts have highlighted as likely for 2022 and beyond.

Green Data Centers: Tackling Sustainability and the Climate Crisis

According to Vertiv, the data center industry has moved towards more climate-friendly practices in recent years, but operators will get more purposeful about climate efforts in 2022. On the operational side, Vertiv experts predict that some organizations will adopt a sustainable energy strategy, leveraging a digital solution to match energy use with 100% renewable energy and eventually run on 24/7 sustainable energy.

“This hybrid distributed energy system can provide both AC and DC power, which increases the options for improving efficiency and ultimately allowing data centers to operate carbon-free. Fuel cells, renewable assets and long-term energy storage systems, including battery storage system (BESS) and lithium-ion batteries*, will both play an important role in delivering sustainable, resilient and reliable outcomes," the report added.

When it comes to lithium-ion batteries, Vertiv experts expect lithium battery recycling infrastructure to expand in 2022 and remove one of the few remaining barriers to widespread adoption of lithium-ion batteries in data centers. In a more immediate period, Vertic predicts that extreme weather events related to climate change will influence decisions about where and how to build new data centers and telecommunications networks.

“Other factors, including grid reliability and affordability, regional temperature, availability of water and renewable and locally generated sustainable energy, and regulations that ration utility power and limit the amount of power delivered to data centers, Both played a role in the decision-making - as did the production," it added.

AI in the Data Center Gets Real

Given that today's networks have become more complex and distributed, the need for real-time computation and decision-making has become increasingly important. On top of that, the need for augmented and virtual reality in virtual worlds is also becoming more prominent.

"This real-time requirement is sensitive to latency, and full-time manual management is impractical, if not impossible, under the increasingly prevalent hybrid model of enterprise, public and private cloud, colocation, and edge," the report states.

That said, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are critical to optimizing the performance of these networks, Vertiv said. "Collecting the right data, building the right models, and training the network platform to make the right decisions takes focus and time.

Even smaller companies are embracing AI, given AI hardware from existing vendors, identical cloud options, simplified toolchains, and an educational focus on data science, the report said. "This all accelerates AI adoption in 2022," Vertiv noted.

The post-pandemic data center will take over the stage

Around 29 gigawatts of new data centers are being built globally, according to Vertiv. "These data centers will be the first to be purpose-built to meet the demands of the post-COVID-19 world. More activity will be concentrated at the edge, and VMware expects a dramatic shift in workload distribution there -- from 5 percent today to 30% over the next five years," it added.

While availability will remain a top priority, Vertiv noted that there is a growing need to reduce latency in support of healthy buildings, smart cities, distributed energy and 5G. The report concludes: “(Overall) in 2022, we will increase investment in cutting-edge technologies to support this new normal (remote work, increased reliance on e-commerce and telemedicine, video streaming) and continue to roll out 5G."