Facilities Infrastructure and AI

With AI in the news every day, it's become a topic on everyone's mind. But how is it helping your data center's critical facilities infrastructure (FIT)? Well, that is an easy one to answer. Adding AI can quickly increase computing power, drive more capacity and enhance management in numerous ways.

While AI research extends back to the 1950s, it is only in the last decade or so that the technology has come into its own, delivering credible results in a wide range of fields. AI has the potential to revolutionize the fields by streamlining processes, improving efficiency and providing more accurate and actionable insights.

Examples of FIT & AI

Facilities Infrastructure is a complex space supporting the most critical of IT environments. Here's a sample of how to attach AI:

• Predictive maintenance: Using AI to analyze data from all the critical equipment and sensors to predict when maintenance will be needed before an unexpected outage.
• Energy management: AI will optimize energy usage and reduce energy bills leading to cost savings.
• Space utilization: AI can help with capacity planning, space management and better workflows.
• Security: Adding AI to your physical security can help detect and prevent security breaches and improve emergency responses.
• Resources: Automating routine tasks will free up maintenance staff.
• Role of AI: Processing large amounts of information in real-time and applying heuristics to detect essential signals and trends within incomplete data sets.
• Sustainability: With the decentralized grid of the future, variable renewable energy supplies will have to be dispatched as efficiently as possible to keep the network steady.

Some questions to ponder

When thinking about FIT and AI, it will help to consider these three questions:

1. Are you prepared for the adoption of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that have accelerated AI tasks due to their specialized capabilities in your data centers?
2. Are you prepared for the high-density racks required to maximize computing power per square foot and efficiently utilize space?
3. Are you prepared for the advanced cooling strategies needed to support AI?

Facilities infrastructure has largely sat on the margins of this trend, perhaps because many infrastructures have been viewed as relatively static following installation or commissioning. However, today's infrastructures have the increased need to adapt to changing environmental circumstances and be flexible enough to admit transitions related to energy flows, new materials and reuse and recycling.

It is becoming increasingly clear that more innovative infrastructure can significantly impact sustainability. That will make AI an intelligent choice for a growing number of critical infrastructure projects in the future.

Conclusion

Let us help you uncover the benefits of AI in your critical facilities space. Schedule a workshop with our facilities infrastructure team to help evaluate and roadmap your data center with an AI component.

Don't forget that AI delivers across all disciplines in your data center. So let us help you engage with our data center practice to gain the same dependability with your IT hardware and software, our data protection for the expanded storage solutions, and finally, connect with our data analytics so that in the end, your data center can truly be dependable.