Beyond Five Nines: Navigating the Evolution of Redundancy in Data Center Design
episode
The Watchtower - Mission Critical and Data Center Perspectives
24 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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How are data center segments diverging on redundancy and downtime tolerance?
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Watchtower by Empirics Partners, a strategic sourcing and procurement advisory specifically designed for the mission-critical space. I'm Zach Pena, CEO here at Empirics, and I'm joined by my Chief of Staff, Ethan Summers. We focus on conversations on the data center industry, providing perspectives and insights into what's changing and the mindsets required for long-term success at scale. Let's get into it.
Zach, we're seeing something really interesting emerge here in the data center space. It really seems like almost two segments are emerging. There's developers or owner-operators who need traditional redundancy. Then there's those who think they've engineered around it. Given the scale of things these days, people are placing billion, even multi-billion dollar bets on essentially, do I or do I not need redundancy? Or what does redundancy even mean? A couple of years ago, that was almost a holy word, right? You had to have it. Now it seems like it's fair game. What do we think is going on? You mean five nines is dead? It's either dead or we're going to seven nines or a negative one. I don't know. Every day it's different on LinkedIn.
What if we just get rid of the nines? Just five? Just five.
What does that mean?
Five nines? Exactly. Oh. No one knows what it means, but it's provocative. It gets the people going. Redundancy is what I'd like to almost bring all the way back to the just simplistic form of being lean.
Mm-hmm.
right? The right amount at the right time for the right reason. And that's what true redundancy is, right? It's having the ability to support the thing you need in the right manner, regardless of application. And if you take it down to that, then you can use that as a basis to then, I think, expand in the right directions. And that could be electrically, mechanically, supply base, whatever that might be.
To be honest, that could be training across multiple data centers.
Correct. There's all kinds of ways to achieve the same effect. Correct. So I think it's getting the right strategic intent, building a lean, quote unquote, strategy around that, and then expanding from there to go do the thing.
100%. I think the shorthand way of saying that is true redundancy is building the system based in a way where it's going to achieve the outcome you need, regardless of if something fails. Correct.
How did the meaning of “five nines” shift in just a few years?
That happens to look like backup gens for a lot of people right now, but there's a million ways through power technology and distributed network partnerships. There's a million ways to achieve that. And I think that's, what's actually going to be pressure tested is the ability. I'm not saying it's easy because dang, those things are expensive, but it's fairly direct to achieve power redundancy by throwing on some backup gens and managing that fleet. I think that's what's going to be pressure tested is we can't just keep having one big redundancy block now. We're going to have to fundamentally look at the system for building and say, what are all the ways that I can create redundancy in this space?
Yeah, it's going to challenge the general concept of redundancy. Because to your point, traditionally, it's been very point at that thing. And now it's going to be what in the system needs to be truly tweaked here and there to give us true redundancy. Absolutely. It's evolving, right? Because the technologies that we keep putting inside these data centers are changing. And not only are they changing in a way in which they're being used, but also the product that's on them. And so it is the, I'll call it current stance, I'll call it from an engineering and commercialization perspective, that the redundancy requirement for some of these applications is just different. Right. I don't think it's right.
I don't think it's wrong. It's just different. And so, you know, it's going to be very interesting, I'd say, over the next 12 to 24 months when these large scale products come online that in for a lack of better words, I think the industry is just calling them AI factories.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How are data center segments diverging on redundancy and downtime tolerance?
0:15–2:38
2
How did the meaning of “five nines” shift in just a few years?
2:38–9:04
3
Why do AI training facilities tolerate different levels of redundancy?
9:04–18:15
4
How could reduced redundancy change equipment demand and OEM lead times?
18:15–24:58
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Watchtower - Mission Critical and Data Center Perspectives
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