The datacentre world has been abuzz with familiar themes in 2023. Operators are facing pressure to be more sustainable while meeting the soaring demand for compute capacity and ensuring uptime.
Operators face challenges in finding new datacentre sites due to power and space constraints, rising costs, and planning permission disputes. As the year comes to an end, Computer Weekly revisits the top 10 datacentre stories of 2023.
1. Datacentre outage post-mortem reveals NHS trust sat on red flags over cooling systems for years
A post-mortem report from January 2023 into a summer 2022 heatwave-related server farm outage at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust revealed that the organization was warned back in 2018 about issues with one of its datacentres’ cooling systems.
The incident had a lasting impact, resulting in unexpected IT costs of around £1.4m, which the report said could have been prevented.
2. Elon Musk calls halt to datacentre downsizing at Twitter in wake of outage
In February 2023, a datacentre outage that took down the social media site, formerly known as Twitter, led its CEO, Elon Musk, to stop the downsizing of its server farm footprint as a top priority.
The company also paused its plans to move more of its infrastructure to the Google public cloud due to cost concerns.
3. Devon-based leisure centre joins datacentre heat reuse bandwagon
In March 2023, a mini-datacentre startup in Devon showcased the use of waste heat from datacentres to create hot water for local businesses.
Deep Green, the startup behind this initiative, deployed its mini-datacentres at a leisure center in Devon, using immersion-cooling technology to supply hot water to the site.
4. Scottish government courts datacentre developers
As the demand for compute capacity grows, the Scottish government continued its push to attract datacentre investors to build facilities in Scotland, emphasizing it as a viable alternative to the major colocation hubs in London.
