NEWS

What’s new in 2022!

Jan 06, 2022

"Data centres will continue to be seen as a top performing investment asset class by both individual and corporate investors."

  • The boom in African data centre development will continue to grow and accelerate in 2022.

  • Data Centre M&A activity will continue to be high throughout the first 6 months of the year in particular.

  • Continuing equipment supply chain issues throughout 2022.

  • Data centres will continue to be seen as a top performing investment asset class by both individual and corporate investors. This has significantly picked up during 2021 due to the diminishing interest in other property asset classes during the Covid pandemic and increasing uncertainty over the performance of retail and offices assets. This trend will continue to accelerate during 2022. 

  • Remote / Edge site management for both facilities and ICT infrastructure will become an increasing expectation and necessity. This is being driven by greater Edge deployment requiring the need for remote management of ‘dark’ sites but is also a response to the lessons from the Covid-19 restrictions of travel, which have highlighted both the need and benefit of remote management capabilities. This is in turn has led to a resurgence of interest in genuine DCIM solutions.

  • An increased focus on the energy efficiency implications of Software and ICT Infrastructure rather than the data centre as a building. We have become fixated on the data centre as a building. The issue is that a data centre building does not consume energy. Rather the ICT load within it does. The building merely imposes an overhead on delivery. The techniques and technologies capable reducing this overhead are measured in PUE values. These are well understood, although admittedly yet to be deployed everywhere. The real challenge though lies in the ICT infrastructure and applications that we choose to deploy and use. There seems to be very little focus on energy consumption in these areas unless it is on a mobile device with limited battery life. At the moment we are effectively saying that our house is a horribly inefficient energy consumer because somebody is leaving a hot shower running 24 hours per day. During 2022 there will be an increasing realisation that questioning the decision and value of keeping the shower on are more appropriate than focusing on how the house insulation is performing!

  • During 2022 is the surge of personal data becoming available and the increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques being applied to multiple data sets means that the information whole that is increasingly available is far greater than the sum of its disparate parts. This will be become increasingly apparent during 2022 with resulting social and legal challenges around privacy and information rights as governments and legislation struggle, and broadly fail, to keep pace with technological advances.   
  • During 2022 governments globally will increasingly attempt to address the issues created by technology developments in AI and ML alongside the increasing amounts of personally identifiable data available, without stifling the benefits that these technologies can bring. A very difficult path to tread. Greater attention will be focussed on the social media platforms to become more responsible and less profiteering.

  • Liquid Cooling of all types will continue to be promoted heavily and gain niche appeal but will continue to be very far from mainstream deployment in the short term, certainly not during 2021.

  • 5G will continue to be promoted 'coming soon' with the offer of improved mobile network access, but the reality will be that infrastructure roll out will be slow and services very limited in 2022 despite the hype. The immediate impact will be very limited or even unnoticed this year. The investment and infrastructure required for significant coverage beyond major metropolitan areas is greater than many appreciate and will hold back deployment. 


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