Why big data is still a big opportunity for banks

Data centers will run themselves now. Source: Shutterstock

How AI helps better manage and run data centers

DATA centers play a critical role in most organizations. Whether owned or leased, whole or shared, data centers must be run optimally and maintained well if organizations are to rely on them.

And although humans operators do a great job, companies are waking up to the reality that maybe artificial intelligence (AI) is actually better suited for the role of managing and running data centers.

With just a little support from maintenance staff, infrastructure experts are coming to the conclusion that AI can actually run a tighter ship — delivering consistency, optimal performance, and cost reductions — all at once.

Here are three reasons why enterprise architects should consider deploying AI in their data centers:

# 1 | AI helps data centers become more energy efficient

Aside from storing data, data centers generate a tonne of data themselves.

Combined with information about the business, seasonality, weather, and other data, algorithmic models can help AI systems predict how best to manage the energy needs of the data center.

Google, for example, used its AI tool called DeepMind AI to run its data centers and managed to reduce its cooling bill by 40 percent.

“Every five minutes, our cloud-based AI pulls a snapshot of the data center cooling system from thousands of sensors and feeds it into our deep neural networks, which predict how different combinations of potential actions will affect future energy consumption,” the company said in a recent blogpost.

“The AI system then identifies which actions will minimize the energy consumption while satisfying a robust set of safety constraints. Those actions are sent back to the data center, where the actions are verified by the local control system and then implemented”.

# 2 | AI leads to stronger data center security

AI is one of the biggest weapons in the arsenal of a cybersecurity specialist and it’s making autonomous data center security a reality.

Capable of identifying new types of malware and flagging malicious behavior, AI helps cybersecurity teams truly transform the amount of data it can rinse without requiring much assistance from the team.

According to one survey, a lot of business leaders are exploring how AI can help better protect their business — with 39 percent claiming that they’re already using AI to address their cybersecurity needs.

Either way, if AI is deployed to fully support data center operations, it’ll be far more likely to spot anomalies and attention from hackers than humans will — only because of its sheer capacity to analyze huge amounts of data (in real time).

# 3 | AI can optimize data center performance

The benefit of using AI in the data center is that it can really optimize how the data center is run.

It’s got all the data about the data center and the business, it understands the needs, the constraints, and the limitations of the data center, and hence, it’s easy for an AI model to optimize the data performance of the data center.

In fact, according to Gartner, 30 percent of data centers that fail to apply AI and machine learning effectively in support of enterprise business will cease to be operationally and economically viable by 2020.

This highlights the importance of deploying AI in the data center to optimize performance — because optimal performance not only means improved efficiency but also reduced costs.