This boom presents exciting opportunities, like embracing innovative strategies to drive success in digital transformation initiatives. However, local organisations are also grappling with the challenges that come with their transformation efforts. For instance, this shift is prompting IT leaders to re-evaluate and modernise their infrastructure to ensure it can support the demands of emerging technologies, meet data requirements, and align with their overall business goals. In some cases, this involves deploying high-capacity, high-performance compute setups with configurations requiring up to 100 kilowatts per rack.
At the same time, challenges around environmental footprints, legal compliance, and security requirements remain critical. With this in mind, let’s explore some considerations for organisations who are looking to stay ahead of the game in Australia’s data centre market.
Converting legacy centres
The prevalence of older data centres filled with cumbersome, legacy technology is one of most significant operational factors – and hindrances – in today’s environment. The modernisation of these centres is an essential step to improving Australia’s digital capabilities and reducing our carbon footprint.
Instead of a full-scale transition, many data centres could start with a pilot project, focusing on one or two racks or sections of the facility. This allows them to evaluate the effectiveness of liquid cooling in a controlled environment before scaling it to the entire data centre. Additionally, legacy data centres can gradually upgrade to liquid cooling by transitioning specific high-density zones to liquid cooling first, while the rest of the facility uses air-based cooling.
Interactive can assist with the design and implementation of this technology within our own data centres or provide consultation about how these types of capabilities can be provided from your own facilities, if suitable.
Lead the regulatory charge
To stay on the cutting edge, keep on top of regulatory requirements not only required in Australia, but also the gold standard of ISO14001.
ISO14001, which comes out of Europe, is the internationally recognised standard for environmental management systems (EMS). It provides a framework for organisations to design and implement an EMS and continually improve their environmental performance. ISO14001 helps organisations like Interactive improve their environmental performance through more efficient use of resources and reduce their environmental impact relating to the delivery of data centre capacity and services.
Future-proofing energy efficiency
Australian data centres have significant growth potential. However, alongside this potential comes increasing energy demands, as data centres are set to increase the demand and resources of the national electricity grid.
This is especially true for data centres with traditional air-cooling solutions, which struggle with heat loads from high-performance computing. Data centre operators are looking to optimise energy efficiency, and this is driving the need for more efficient cooling.
Depending on an organisation’s computing requirements, they could consider data centre cooling solutions like Direct Liquid to Chip (DL2C) or liquid immersion cooling.
DL2C cooling is a technology where liquid coolant is circulated through pipes attached directly to the chips in the servers. This method targets the most heat-intensive components—like processors and GPUs—efficiently managing heat dissipation without taking up additional space.
Immersion cooling works by submerging servers in a tank filled with non-conductive liquid that absorbs heat from the components. This approach can handle extremely high-density configurations, dissipating up to 100 kilowatts of heat per rack, though it can require spatial reconfigurations.
One key difference between immersion cooling and DL2C is that immersion cools the entire server, while DL2C focuses on specific components. DL2C and immersion cooling both offer ways for organisations to get out of legacy systems and support high-compute customers, all while using energy as efficiently as possible.
Data sovereignty
Securing national privacy and security is more important than ever, and data centres play a foundational role in enabling exactly that. However, almost six in ten (59 per cent) of Australian businesses use cloud technology, with much of this data being stored by foreign cloud giants. Relying on overseas organisations decreases our authorities’ capacity to exercise complete oversight and control over data management, access, confidentiality and integrity protections. This creates risk and a lack of resilience.
Alternatively, keeping Australian data on Australian soil means that the data is in the hands of Australian people, our government and industry. The ultimate financial and security safeguards that come with storing data in Australia are well worth the investment. This puts organisations in control of their data, vendor relationships and business optimisation.
Overall, the future of data centres is bright and exciting. With our nation’s current data centre capacity filling up, now is the time to supplement our future by investing in modern data centres. Australian organisations have an opportunity to adopt efficient, sustainable data centre solutions, which will help attract high-compute customers and meet data sovereignty requirements. Australia can become a regional leader in sustainable, sovereign, and cutting-edge data centre solutions with the right investments today.
