The datacentre industry has been dominated by a set of familiar themes throughout 2023, as operators find themselves under pressure to embrace sustainability, while juggling the demand for compute capacity and ensuring uptime.
It is a delicate balancing act that operators have to strike, at a time when many of them are finding it increasingly difficult to find new sites to set up datacentres due to power and space constraints, as well as rising costs and planning permission disputes.
As 2023 draws to a close, let’s take a look back at the year’s top 10 datacentre stories.
1. Datacentre outage post-mortem reveals NHS trust sat on red flags over cooling systems for years
A post-mortem report released in January 2023 into a summer 2022 heatwave-related server farm outage at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust revealed the organization was warned way back in 2018 about shortcomings in one of its datacentres’ cooling systems.
The impact of the incident was felt for several months after, with the Trust incurring unexpected IT costs in the region of £1.4m, after suffering – what the report termed a “potentially preventable event”.
2. Elon Musk calls halt to datacentre downsizing at Twitter in wake of outage
A datacentre outage that knocked the social media site formerly known as Twitter offline for users across world prompted its CEO, Elon Musk, in February 2023 to halt work on downsizing its server farm footprint as a matter of priority.
The company also reportedly pressed pause on its plans to migrate more of its infrastructure to the Google public cloud in the wake of these issues, with industry watchers citing spiraling costs as a factor in that decision.
3. Devon-based leisure centre joins datacentre heat reuse bandwagon
Finding viable use cases for the large amounts of waste heat datacentres generate has been a labor of love for the industry for several years now, but a story in March 2023 showcased how a mini-datacentre startup was using its setup to help create hot water that could be used by local businesses.
The startup – known as Deep Green – had deployed its mini-datacentres at a leisure centre in Devon and shared details of how, with the help of immersion-cooling technology, the warm air generated was helping supply the site with hot water.
4. Scottish government courts datacentre developers
With operators continuing to favor the building of datacentres in hubs that are already at close to full capacity, the industry faced renewed (and repeated) calls this year to think beyond London and the other major colocation hubs when building facilities to meet the growing demand for compute capacity.
Among them was the Scottish government, who pressed on with its multi-year push to champion north of the border as a viable, alternative location for datacentre investors to build new sites.