By Jason Low
On October 14 2023, hundreds of Asian businesses went offline for over 12 hours, sending the business community into a frenzy. The incident – which impacted two of Singapore’s biggest banks – was soon attributed to a failure at an Equinix data centre. Four months later, the Singaporean Government has unveiled significant reforms to ensure that impact is never felt again.
Data centres are the essential backbone that underpins every business, powering how they store, manage and process massive amounts of data. Even a short disruption to a data centre’s operation can have major implications for businesses. The Equinix outage, for example, impacted both DBS and Citibank, causing 2.5 million payment transactions to fail. As a nation heavily dependent on digital financial transactions, Singapore’s business community can’t afford such outages.
Thus, few were surprised when Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) unveiled its Digital Infrastructure Act last month. Although specifics of the act are still to be revealed, the legislation will have big impacts on cloud service providers and data centres, alongside other key entities holding sensitive data that are essential public functions.
The Singaporean Government rightly recognises the need to place safeguards and regulations around this digital infrastructure. Data centres effectively power Singapore’s heavily digitalised economy and society. Protecting them from external cyber threats is one key measure; another is to make this critical infrastructure more resilient to everyday risks. These can include anything from misconfigurations in technical architecture to physical hazards such as fires, water leaks, and cooling system failures – the latter of which caused the Equinix outage.
While regulatory measures are welcome, data centre operators should proactively enhance their digital infrastructures’ resilience. In doing so, operators should prevent issues and malfunctions from happening in the first place. Fortunately, cooling technology is rapidly developing and offers data centre resilience across a range of hazards.
High demand, high temperatures
Data centres are underpinned by thousands of high-end servers that generate enormous power. However, a byproduct is that they also generate a lot of heat. Data centres therefore need to constantly cool equipment within data centres, maintaining the servers at an optimal temperature to perform best.
Cooling is required in all data centres, but in an equatorial location like Singapore, the energy output to cool these servers is even higher. Singapore has consistently high humidity levels that affect IT equipment performance and increase energy consumption.
Due to high demand for computing power, data centres in Singapore need to operate 24/7 to support businesses across Asia Pacific and provide uninterrupted services. This constant operation requires significant amounts of energy, especially for cooling systems that operate continuously in a humid environment.
Singapore’s land scarcity is exacerbating this issue. Data centres here are high-density operations which can lead to increased energy consumption, as they require more energy to cool a smaller area with a high concentration of IT equipment.
These challenges highlight the pressing need for investment in data centre cooling technology. Traditionally, data centre operators may have used air conditioning or water to cool servers – the former being more inefficient and the latter posing a higher risk of damage to computing equipment.
However, an increasing number of data centres are turning to Precision Liquid Cooling Technology (PLC). This involves integrating industry-standard air-cooled servers into exceptionally efficient liquid cooling chassis, housed within vertical racks. Its inherent scalability facilitates rapid deployment, while addressing Singapore’s land scarcity. Utilising an environmentally friendly dielectric coolant, this technology precisely targets and eliminates the heat generated by these servers, ensuring optimal performance and sustainability.
The efficiency of Precision Liquid Cooling technology also offers another benefit that is of increasing importance in Singapore: climate change. In line with Singapore’s Green Plan, Precision Liquid Cooling drives sustainability initiatives in data centres, offering substantial energy savings of up to 40%, carbon emission reductions of up to 40%, and an astounding decrease in water consumption by up to 96%. As data centres are among some of the world’s biggest consumers of energy, with a carbon footprint said to be higher than that of airlines, investing in such energy-efficient cooling systems may only be one step on Singapore’s path to a sustainable economy, but it is significant.
As technology advances and Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, data centres’ energy output will only increase. Data centre operators now must prioritise such cooling systems capable of handling heavy computing and powering huge advances in AI. At the same time, they must still maintain performance efficiency and safeguard hardware integrity.
Policymakers can aid with this advancement by mandating sustainability in data centre operations while incentivising the adoption of energy-efficient equipment and renewable energy sources. Collaboration between the public sector and industry leaders is key to building a sustainable and innovative data centre sector.
Such collaboration can help data centre operators adopt renewable energy solutions like Precision Liquid Cooling systems to cut energy consumption and costs. This, in tandem with rigorous monitoring and optimisation, should both improve a centre’s efficiency and mitigate the risk of future outages.
Data centre operators and policymakers must prioritise operational consistency and safety above anything else. However, sustainability is becoming increasingly paramount as regulations to reduce the carbon footprint and energy consumption tighten across the technology industry. By implementing advanced cooling technology and practices, data centres can improve reliability, resiliency and reduce costs while also contributing to a more sustainable future.
Jason Low is regional head, APAC for Iceotope
