The global energy market is currently experiencing some extreme turmoil, with low availability resulting in steep price increases. The turbulence is particularly pronounced in the UK, where spiralling power bills are raising concerns for both consumers and businesses alike over whether or not they’ll be able to afford them.
The IT industry isn’t exempt from these challenges; in fact, thanks to the extreme power usage that data centre infrastructure requires, the risk of further price rises should be extremely worrying for cloud service providers, as well as the end customers that rely on those services. This week, we talk to Tiny Haynes, Senior Director of Research at Gartner, about what the current energy crisis could mean for the UK’s data centre ecosystem, the risk of potential outages, and how organisations can insulate themselves from some of the potential damage.
Highlights
“As far as price rises go, I can only see them going up. I would not be surprised if they are looking to double in the same way that the consumer prices are doubling. In fact, I've seen non-datacenter operators, but other organisations, seeing their prices go up by a factor of three, which possibly could happen in the datacenter market over the next six to 12 months.”
“Ireland has currently got a moratorium on new data centre build, because they just can't provide the power required for these DCs. I mean, some of these DCs, you're talking tens of megawatts of power requirements. So it might be worth some of these guys to say, Okay, what we'll do is we'll buy your datacenter for our own services, but we'll just trash all your systems and services, because we won't making any money out of that, or it might cost us too much to go and reengineer it for our own platform.”
“I've been talking to customers this week, more and more about data centre consolidation, seeing where the opportunities are going to be to the quick wins. The reality is a DC migration is a six to nine month process. So even if you start today, you're not necessarily going to see a way around the pain in the short term.”
Read the full transcript here.
Footnotes
- Going into the office won't save you on energy bills
- Energy as a service market poised to reach $147 billion by 2029
- Why is the energy sector so vulnerable to hacking?
- European energy company and gas pipeline hacked by AlphV ransomware
- North Korea-linked hackers target US energy sector by exploiting VMware Horizon
- Nvidia turns to liquid cooling to curb data centre energy consumption
- Singapore to resume construction on new data centres following energy efficiency review
- How do you build a green data centre?
- Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining to avoid nation-wide energy blackouts
- How UK businesses can use microgrids to dodge rising energy costs
- Singapore discourages cryptocurrency trading with new regulations
- Microsoft retrieves underwater data centre after two years
- Google shut down data centre due to multiple cooling failures
- Microsoft successfully tests emission-free hydrogen fuel cell system for data centres
- Singapore relaxes its grip on data centre industry with sustainability pilot
- Google and Oracle data centres hit by issues amidst hottest ever UK day
- The IT Pro Podcast: How Singapore became a data centre powerhouse
- Microsoft's new data centre will heat homes and businesses in Finland
- The IT Pro Podcast: Making data centres green again
- How to keep cloud costs under control
- Nine tips to improve your disaster recovery strategy
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