Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 87 | Page 67

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COOLING FOR EDGE DATA CENTRES NEEDS TO BE MANAGED

IT equipment can produce large amounts of heat on a continuous basis and organisations must take steps to ensure proper cooling of equipment in order to protect it and ensure its availability , explains Jonathan Duncan at Vertiv

Digital transformation means organisations are becoming increasingly reliant on information technology to run almost every aspect of their business . The creation of more data – which needs to be processed and stored – brings with it the corresponding need for more compute power and more data centres .

In many cases , these are not large , purpose-built data centres , but rather close-proximity , smaller edge facilities that share space in the same building as the rest of the business . This , in turn , can create unique challenges with regards to securing the environment and cooling the IT loads .
Edge computing can be described as the concept of having compute and storage capacity physically close to where users are generating , consuming
When the latency involved in sending data to a cloud data centre is too long and becomes an inhibitor , this drives the need for edge data centres .
and manipulating data . We are seeing a rise in edge computing , also known as decentralised IT , driven by such factors as the ongoing rise of the Internet of Things , IoT , which generates significant amounts of data ; legal requirements ; the need to consolidate data ; high network costs ; latency issues , and network security requirements .
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