Join this presentation for an expert review of the steps that data centre operation, management and planning are taking to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint. What are the most interesting and effective initiatives? And how close are data centres to becoming ‘prosumers’ rather than just consumers of energy?

As the largest data centre market in Australasia, Sydney plays a critical role as a digital gateway into and from the region. The city is also a financial, commercial and administrative centre in its own right and the steady growth of the Australian economy is generating strong local demand. This session will review Sydney’s current and future positions and its impact on the local industry.

What are the key impact trends in terms of availability, security, cost, legislation, brand/corporate citizenship? All of these requirements will ask questions of data center power generation, transmission, storage and consumption . This session will look also at relevant technologies and solutions.

The pandemic saw growth in automation inside data centres simply to reduce contact between humans but that was merely the acceleration of a process already established and caused by skills shortage, labour costs and the increasing consequences of error.  How will the interaction between staff and technologies move forward and how will this impact the future skills requirements for data center operation? 

The process of cooling higher rack densities is one of the most long-established and intractable challenges in the data center universe.  Greater demand leads to higher densities which require more cooling and heat removal. Cooling remains in focus also as the most major consumer of power into the data centre after the IT load.  How can future technologies and practices help break cooling’s upward energy consumption and cost spiral while continuing to meet performance requirements?     

Enterprise companies are the foundation of the datacenter/cloud ecosystem. Decision making becomes more complex as providers and technologies evolve and as the number of options and the amount of information increase also. How well are provider strategies and execution meeting enterprise requirements and how far are customer needs in fact shaped by what’s on offer?

Scalability has traditionally been a capability associated with the largest, hyperscale data centers. How can the principle of scale be applied to smaller data centers and to Edge, and why? 

As larger numbers of businesses across Australia embark on digitalisation, what role will Edge play in their future IT delivery strategy? How will Edge evolve to play this role for different types of use case and how can it be customised to do so? Who will drive this roll-out and where will investment come from? 

What are some of the key technologies and ideas that we can expect to see come onto the market in coming years? Which will contribute most to the challenges faced by data centres and cloud? How will they do so?

As digital infrastructure has become more central to Australia’s economy and society so it has become more subject to legislation in terms of build, operations, resource consumption, H&S practices, reporting and the data housed. How will this focus evolve over the next few years and what will this mean for the future growth of the sector?

The past couple of years have confirmed how unpredictable the factors impacting on data centre supply and demand and the world at large can be. Which future scenarios should data centres and cloud in Australia prepare for? Our panel of experts from different specialist areas will share their knowledge and insights which the panel will then debate.  Which growth drivers will assume greatest importance? How will data centers need to adapt to meet future sets of challenges?