Danny is Co-Founder & CEO of TerraScale, Inc., a clean infrastructure design and development firm shaping digital infrastructures globally.
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In the elusive quest for a truly smart city, we need to rethink the parameters. All too often, smart city initiatives have been bogged down by cosmetic enhancements, such as lowering carbon emissions or improving neighborhood lighting solutions. While both are worthy causes, realizing the full potential of smart cities requires a deeper, more thoughtful approach. At the core of this approach is the digital infrastructure, specifically data centers.
The average person conjures an image of a data center as a monolithic facility with rows and rows of computer racks studded with blinking lights. That is certainly true in most cases today; however, smart cities of the future need to consider the data center as an ecosystem – social and economic lifeblood for the surrounding population. Whether large or small, data centers fulfill a vital function that allows edge computing platforms to enable seamless transportation over fiber, 5G and satellites. In order for this ecosystem to survive and grow, it will need to be greener, smarter and secure.
Greener. It is estimated by 2025 that data centers and associated IT infrastructure will consume over 4% of the world's power and will only increase as more of the world moves into the status of IT-enabled. Large data center requirements within the U.S. could easily reach 100 megawatts (MW) of power or enough to power around 80,000 U.S. households. The data center industry must commit to reducing the production of carbon emissions and making our planet greener, especially on continents with many developing nations like Africa along with South and Central America. This increased demand requires data center owners and operators to embrace green energy as a solution to these power requirements.
Smarter. Global IP traffic – otherwise known as the quantity of data moving through the internet – increased more than tenfold in the period between 2010 and 2018. Alongside, the storage capacity of global data centers increased by a factor of 25. There was also a significant increase in the number of computer instances – a measure of total applications hosted – taking place on the world's servers. This increased demand requires new data center ingenuity and design that complements existing and future transport architectures. Traditional big data centers will not be able to meet the growing requirements.
We often hear the terms edge data center or hybrid data center, but the truth is designing new dynamic transport and data storage solutions will be required. For example, how much computing power does it take for a city full of autonomous vehicles? Where should that computing power be located, and how will it be backed up? The latency with traditional solutions and architectures will likely not meet these requirements.
Secure. In today's IT environment, smart and secure are somewhat synonymous. Security must be baked into products like smart cars. It cannot be bolted on like today's traditional end-point security solutions. For this reason, new technologies and microservices must be rolled out in a manner that makes ownership of data irrefutable. Innovations like quantum cryptology not only offer possible solutions to these security concerns but also increase the demand for data center processing and storage. In a world of driverless automobiles, we cannot afford for hackers to have any security gap to exploit as the result could lead to large-scale loss of life.
For property managers and owners in cities, it's helpful to know where these data centers may be located. I believe the natural location for data centers in future smart cities would tend toward commercialized office buildings or large residential buildings. Power, the ability to access and store it, will be the main limiting factor, but other ideal locations would have a good rooftop for 5G and/or satellite connectivity.
We have come a long way in recent years in recognizing the true promise and potential of the modern smart city. No longer a trendy buzzword, we are fortunate to live in the generation in which green smart cities – and the secure infrastructures that support them –are not only achievable but inevitable, especially as post-pandemic life continues to remake the urban landscape.
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