Why smart cities need smarter data centers?

Urban centers across the world are exploding. By 2050, about 68% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas. Rapid urbanization coupled with the increase in the global population is expected to add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas, according to the 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects produced by the United Nations.

India, Nigeria, and China will account for 35% of the projected growth of the world’s urban population. As per the projections, India will have added 416 million urban dwellers, Nigeria 189 million and China 255 million by 2050. Consequently, cities will face a tough challenge to provide the infrastructure and connectivity to support the large populations.

Smart is the way

Smart cities, which integrate multiple information and communication technologies, and IoT solutions to create a more efficient, responsive and sustainable city, are the answer to the urban challenges of the future.

Smart cities will harness data and digital technology to optimize resources, provide better services and improve the quality of life of its residents. Comprehensive, real-time data will enable agencies and city councils to keep an eye on events as they unfold, monitor and analyze the changing demand patterns, and respond with faster and lower-cost solutions.

However, real-time monitoring systems generate huge volumes of data. Global forecasts indicate average daily data consumption in the range of 1.5 GB of traffic per person by 2020 (Source: Open Source Leadership Summit 2018/Intel). Add that to the data generated by connected factories (3 PB per day for each factory), daily data traffic volumes from self-driving cars roughly 4 TB per day for every vehicle and smart hospitals (3 TB per day for a hospital), the amount of data generated will be mind-boggling.

The humongous amount of data generated will require intelligent data centers which will act as the single source of truth. The data centers will abstract, store and share data from multiple sources in a structured format after enrichment with contextual knowledge.

High tier data centers with excellent uptime reliability will serve as the core of the smart city intelligent architecture and remain critical for its seamless functioning.

Additionally, reliable network access, backed up by multiple redundancies and blended across multiple service providers will be required for easy and quick availability of the data.

The data center landscape has witnessed a significant shift from one large machine doing everything to thousands of small machines performing the same thing which has enabled maximization of resources and cutting down computing costs.

The future of things

Cities will benefit from more edge data centers that allow companies to better reach users with minimal latency. Designed to complement existing public cloud or co-location deployments, the edge data centers guarantee advantages that neither possess.

The deployment of an edge data center close to the end-user or to the source of the data to be processed boosts its abilities to support applications that demand a significant amount of bandwidth, require rapid response times, or are latency-sensitive.

The launch of 5G, IoT proliferation, widening data gap, adoption of SDN and NFV tech, and video streaming and AR/VR have fuelled the growth of the edge data centers. The global market for edge data centers is expected to nearly triple to $13.5 billion in 2024.

Modular data centers are also gaining significant traction as a means to optimize cost and efficiency and keep pace with the evolution of technology. Modular data centers combine compute, power, fire detection, storage, cooling and security into prefabricated form factors.

The commissioning phase of modular data centers is minimal (in the order of weeks) and does away with the need for specialized support skillsets to integrate it. Real estate savings due to smaller footprints and lower power utilization efficiency factors make edge data centers ideal for rapid or makeshift deployment scenarios.

Technology will play the key enabler which will help megacities transform into smart megacities and provide a better and improved quality of life for its residents. And data centers will remain at the core of the technology solutions that will help build the cities of tomorrow.

 Prasanna Sarambale, CEO, Data Center business and Group Head - Business Development, Sterling and Wilson