Telework Brings Data Centers to the Forefront
Many networks have had to upgrade their capacity since the pandemic hit.
As COVID has sent workers to their home offices, many companies are upgrading their networks.
“A lot of networks had to do very significant upgrades to their capacity to really meet that work from home surge,” said Charles Meyers, CEO of data center REIT Equinix on the CBRE’s “The Weekly Take” podcast. “Zoom, for example, went from something like 10 million sessions a day to 400. In short order, 400 million and, you know, were a huge part of their infrastructure.”
Pat Lynch, CBRE senior managing director for Data Center Solutions, said that this dramatic increase in telework has “brought the data center and the network and the importance of that to the forefront for almost any company in the world right now.”
“And that’s been, I think, eye-opening and certainly has helped the industry and the business for sure,” he says.
Even when workers head back to the office, Meyers says data center needs will remain front and center. “I think the bigger driver is really the importance of digital and digital transformation as a business priority for people and also how important digital is to the lives of the consumer and therefore all the people that are delivering those services who need to continuously upgrade and adapt their infrastructure to meet those needs,” he says.
Lynch says his data center clients are increasingly seeking a hybrid I.T. adoption, where they can connect to multiple cloud providers and be in a secure environment.
Power and fiber play considerable roles in where data centers are located. Spencer Levy, chairman of Americas Research and senior economic advisor for CBRE, quoted a two-year-old statistic from The Economist indicating that data centers consumed 7% of all the world’s energy. Meyers says that number has now risen above 7%.
Those costs can be mitigated by proximity to low-cost power or sources of cooling, according to Meyers.
“However, not all data centers can be out in the middle of nowhere because the need for them to deliver information in a real-time fashion is still there for many use cases,” Meyers says. “And so what you see is this sort of tiered architecture of data centers where, you know, large server farms with less real-time needs can be located further out, closer to power sources.”
But when data needs to be transmitted quickly, data centers need to be “closer to urban centers where fiber densities are higher and connectivity is higher,” according to Meyers.