By Piyush Somani, CEO & MD, ESDS Solutions Private Ltd
AI was never a pulling a rabbit from a hat kind of gimmick; it was here to stay and is slowly becoming a part of our daily lives. From AI-enabled assistants to chatbots and now to various GenAI products and platforms, we’ve seen them all. But, apart from its ability to affect and influence daily lives and businesses, this one impact of Artificial Intelligence often doesn’t become part of any headline. It is the effect and influence of AI on Data Centers that we, as Data Center professionals, shall be ready with a roadmap to ensure complete readiness.
The tricky thing about AI is that it is not a single piece of platform from a deployment perspective; it has two distinct phases. First is the learning or training phase, and then is the application stage, where it applies what it learned. All this will result in hefty demand, and meeting this elevated demand will be an upheaval task for Data Centre professionals. Various industry leaders have had their concerns, especially when we are talking about hosting a mammoth quantity of servers and considering cooling techniques to combat the heat
generated by these servers. If we consider a Google AI report in that case, there will be up to a 40% reduction in energy consumption for cooling and a 40% faster workload provisioning. But we will need to see if it happens soon, as data centers have mainly managed considerably consistent workloads.
We at ESDS are ahead of the curve as our R&D team has already worked on it and developed our flagship solution, eNlight 360 0. It is a triple-patented platform that, through AI & ML, smartly monitors and enables operators to orchestrate their infrastructure accordingly. We are trying to overcome this significant shortfall through this, as we all know about the importance of and buzz that shortfall of microprocessors and graphic processing units (GPU). Though the government is taking substantial steps to overcome this shortfall, what we are trying to initiate is a process to function on India’s AI cloud as a cloud service provider. But this will take some time, and the shortage of microprocessors will be a pain point for some time. Accompanying this will be the data center shortages, not just because of the lack of hardware but also because of the finite power and land resources that a country like India has. These are not unsolvable issues, but the solutions will need both time and hefty investment. Not to forget that with the speed at which AI is spreading its roots in businesses and our daily lives, coping will be a massive task at hand.
The final word
Data centre service providers and professionals need not to and are not hitting the panic button. Instead, we are looking to scale our infrastructure and technology, keeping this boosting demand in mind. After all, we, too, have learned our lessons in the post-pandemic phase and are ready with our fleet of armor to face whatever challenges come our way, right from procuring bigger and better campuses to even delivering edge data center facilities to suit the customers’ needs. Then, there will be a need for innovation for various sections of data center operations like cooling technology and overall infrastructure that the industry needs to
consider. Not to forget about the preparedness for the data security challenges that AI is going to pose, but yes, there is also the use of AI that will enable us to tackle it. So, if we look at AI as a challenge, it also presents a chance for Data Center service providers to provide better services and solutions for our customers.