Artificial intelligence is renewing data centers and improving efficiency, operations and performance with new capabilities. Centers of all kinds are taking advantage of the capabilities of AI, from automated workload management to smart cybersecurity. AI is also becoming more accessible to smaller data centers and new developments are moving them towards full automation.
How data centers can use AI
The largest data centers and storage providers – such as Google, Amazon and Facebook – have been using artificial intelligence for years. For these “hyperscalers”, AI technologies are much more accessible and economically viable to develop and deploy. For most data centers, AI is just becoming a reasonable investment.
Many centers are using AI to improve their business efficiency, especially in power and cooling management. Any data scientist knows that these two operational aspects are the most crucial. Unfortunately, they can also be a significant source of costs and tend to be inefficient. Universal cooling needs to cool servers with the highest power consumption, leading to a waste of energy for servers that don’t need it. AI helps with that.
Artificial intelligence can autonomously monitor and adjust the power and cooling needs in a data center. After Google gave DeepMind permission to control its HVAC systems, noticed a 40% increase in energy saving.
Likewise, AI is used to monitor the health of data center equipment, such as humidity, temperature, and operational performance. The data and conclusions collected by AI help data centers perform predictive maintenance, avoiding lengthy downtime for urgent repairs.
Current Trends in Data Center AI
Some key usage trends are emerging as AI becomes more accessible to more data centers. For example, in recent years, security has become a major priority in data centers worldwide. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a global increase in cybercrimeaimed at every industry and every type of organization.
Data centers of all sizes are now vaults for valuable organizational data and must protect themselves from hackers. Artificial intelligence is emerging as a tool to meet these cybersecurity needs. Data centers can use AI to autonomously monitor traffic and report suspicious activity, such as unauthorized or unusual access. They can also use it for access control, authorization and even analysis of risks and vulnerabilities before and after the occurrence of security incidents.
AI traffic monitoring is essential to note as more data centers shift towards cloud storage and operations. Experts note that: traffic is an important factor in how data centers are deployed and organized. The insights gathered by AI surveillance systems can help data centers transition to cloud operations, providing highly granular insight into where the most power and storage is needed and areas that could be more optimised.
Likewise, workload management is: another upcoming popular application for AI in data centers. This takes traffic monitoring one step further and manages workloads in a facility to operate as efficiently as possible. Only this feature can truly breathe new life into centers, improving the performance of old, new, and even hybrid and cloud systems.
Because the AI monitors traffic, workloads, and temperatures in a facility, it can reorganize workloads in real time to keep things running smoothly. This can even help data centers save on energy costs as there will be fewer overheated units in the facility thanks to optimized workload management.
Future applications for AI in data centers
Moving forward, there are a number of future applications and trends for AI in data centers that stand out. As centers expand and develop the capabilities of artificial intelligence in the coming years, these applications will undoubtedly increase.
The most prominent application on the horizon is undoubtedly full automation of data centers using AI. Interestingly, this trend is on the rise in addition to a shortage of data scientists, making it both an industry advance and a response to a growing challenge facing data centers. Experts expect “auto-everything” centers to be better prepared to predict and defend against cybersecurity threats and better optimized for high performance even with minimal staffing.
In addition, R&D continues to expand the capabilities of AI and improve the affordability and accessibility of the technology. Until recently, only large tech companies such as Meta and Alphabet could afford to deploy AI on a large scale.
However, that is changing: in the coming years, more small data centers will be able to use AI technologies and services. Some Big Tech companies are even helping to develop the technology, such as: Facebook’s AI research lab, FAIR – which is expanding natural language processing capabilities of AI models, as well as content moderation and monitoring.
Advances in Data Centers with AI
There are many ways data centers can benefit from integrating artificial intelligence into their organization and operations. AI revitalizes data centers by improving operational efficiency, performance and security.
These features are becoming more widely available, allowing smaller data centers to take advantage of the benefits of this technology. In the coming years, access to artificial intelligence will improve even further, as will the possibilities of AI for total automation of data centers.