The APAC data center market is growing by leaps and bounds, but that spike in demand is creating new challenges that are forcing data centers to evolve towards new architectures.
That was the message from industry experts and customers who gathered at the InterContinental Hong Kong this week to share insights and experience about data center developments in the APAC region.
The Asia Pacific Data Center Technical Summit hosted speakers discussing topics ranging from architecture to operations. Representatives from Tencent, IHS, China Construction Bank, SUNeVision, Keppel, Elitery, and other companies delivered keynotes at the summit.
During his address Jason dePreux, research director for data center and critical infrastructure at analyst firm IHS, noted that APAC's data center market has steadily grown over the past decade to the extent that it now exceeds North America and EMEA.
“In the meantime, limited space, construction time, high labor costs, information security and reliability are all becoming major challenges for data center construction in this region,” he said.
Tencent director of data center facility Zhu Hua noted that the architecture of data centers is changing.
“As the architecture of data centers will be much simpler in the future, the 'modular' conception is becoming popular. Free cooling technology and automatic operation and maintenance are wmerging as key competitive advantages for data centers,” he said.
With Hong Kong emerging as a location of choice for data centers in Asia, SUNeVision Hong Kong CTO Lewis Chan also shared his company's data center construction experience in Tseung Kwan O.
The summit was organized by Huawei Technologies