New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the total number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers increased to 504 at the end of the third quarter, having tripled since the beginning of 2013. The EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions continue to have the highest growth rates, though the US still accounts for almost 40% of the major cloud and internet data center sites.

The next most popular locations are China, Japan, the UK, Germany and Australia, which collectively account for another 32% of the total. Over the last four quarters new data centers were opened in 15 different countries with the U.S., Hong Kong, Switzerland and China having the largest number of additions. Among the hyperscale operators, Amazon and Microsoft opened the most new data centers in the last twelve months, accounting for over half of the total, with Google and Alibaba being the next most active companies. Synergy research indicates that over 70% of all hyperscale data centers are located in facilities that are leased from data center operators or are owned by partners of the hyperscale operators.

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Backgrounder:

One vendor in the data center equipment space recently called hyperscale “too big for most minds to envision.” Scalability has always been about creating opportunities to do small things using resources that happen to encompass a very large scale.

IDC, which provides research and advisory services to the tech industry, classifies any data center with at least 5,000 servers and 10,000 square feet of available space as hyperscale, but Synergy Research Group focuses less on physical characteristics and more on “scale-of-business criteria” that assess a company’s cloud, e-commerce, and social media operations.

A hyperscale data center is to be distinguished from a multi-tenant data center as the former is owned and operated by a mega cloud provider (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc) while the latter is owned and operator by a real estate company that leases cages to tenants who supply their own IT equipment.

A hyperscale data center accomplishes the following functions:

• Maximizes cooling efficiency. The largest operational expense in most data centers worldwide — more so than powering the servers — is powering the climate control systems. A hyperscale structure may be partitioned to compartmentalize high-intensity computing workloads, and concentrate cooling power on the servers hosting those workloads. For general-purpose workloads, a hyperscale architecture optimizes airflow throughout the structure, ensuring that hot air flows in one direction (even if it’s a serpentine one) and often reclaiming the heat from that exhaust flow for recycling purposes.
• Allocates electrical power in discrete packages. In facilities designed to be occupied by multiple tenants, “blocks” are allocated like lots in a housing development. Here, the racks that occupy those blocks are allocated a set number of kilowatts — or, more recently, fractions of megawatts — from the main power supply. When a tenant leases space from a colocation provider, that space is often phrased not in terms of numbers of racks or square footage, but kilowatts. A design that’s more influenced by hyperscale helps ensure that kilowatts are available when a customer needs them.
• Ensures electricity availability. Many enterprise data centers are equipped with redundant power sources (engineers call this configuration 2N), often backed up by a secondary source or generator (2N + 1). A hyperscale facility may utilize one of these configurations as well, although in recent years, workload management systems have made it feasible to replicate workloads across servers, making the workloads redundant rather than the power, reducing electrical costs. As a result, newer data centers don’t require all that power redundancy. They can get away with just N + 1, saving not just equipment costs but building costs as well.
• Balances workloads across servers. Because heat tends to spread, one overheated server can easily become a nuisance for the other servers and network gear in its vicinity. When workloads and processor utilization are properly monitored, the virtual machines and/or containers housing high-intensity workloads may be relocated to, or distributed among, processors that are better suited to its functions, or that are simply not being utilized nearly as much at the moment. Even distribution of workloads directly correlates to temperature reduction, so how a data center manages its software is just as important as how it maintains its support systems.

References:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-hyperscale-data-centers-are-reshaping-all-of-it/

https://www.vxchnge.com/blog/rise-of-hyperscale-data-centers

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Synergy’s research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint of 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Each has 60 or more data center locations with at least three in each of the four regions – North America, APAC, EMEA and Latin America. Oracle also has a notably broad data center presence. The remaining firms tend to have their data centers focused primarily in either the US (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo) or China (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent).

“There were more new hyperscale data centers opened in the last four quarters than in the preceding four quarters, with activity being driven in particular by continued strong growth in cloud services and social networking,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group.

“This is good news for wholesale data center operators and for vendors supplying the hardware that goes into those data centers. In addition to the 504 current hyperscale data centers we have visibility of a further 151 that are at various stages of planning or building, showing that there is no end in sight to the data center building boom.”

Reference:

https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/hyperscale-data-center-count-passed-500-milestone-q3

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