The Growing Criticality of Data Center Operations

Operating and maintaining AI data centers and supercomputing facilities requires technical sophistication and operational rigor. With ML workloads constantly evolving and hardware advancing rapidly, the management complexities far exceed traditional enterprise data centers. Costly operational lapses or outages cannot be tolerated by users on the cutting edge of innovation.

Infrastructure Expertise

Operations teams must master extensive new competencies from AI system benchmarking to optimal cooling solutions. As upgrades are implemented, they must stay abreast of constantly changing hardware and connectivity configurations.

Holistic Monitoring

AI workloads are resource-intensive and power-hungry. Extensive monitoring of utilization metrics, thermal profiles and energy efficiency is needed.

Hybrid Cloud Architectures

Many organizations use a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure for AI. Hybrid environment management, security and data movement create added operational overhead.

Business Alignment

Data Center Operations teams should understand users’ dynamic AI application needs to tailor infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. Close cross-domain collaboration is invaluable.

Risk Management

Due to AI’s complexity, recovery planning and risk assessment processes should be robust. Diverse power sources, redundant network paths and backups help limit disruptions.

For organizations scaling their AI capabilities, choosing partners or infrastructure providers like T5 Data Centers with proven expertise in these areas can enhance deployments’ performance, efficiency and safety.

“Having the right technology and platform in place is absolutely essential for data centers to be successful today. But we can’t overlook the critical importance of having the right team and management to execute the technology strategy,” said John Shingler, Executive Vice President of Data Center Operations at T5 Data Centers. “The most advanced data center infrastructure means nothing without the expertise to leverage it effectively. With the right technology, platform, team and management working in harmony, a data center is positioned to tackle AI developments head on and innovate for the data centers of the future.”

The Importance of Workforce Development

Realizing AI’s full promise requires cultivating talented workforces ready to design, build and operate the underlying infrastructure. As data centers and HPC systems become more advanced to enable cutting-edge AI innovation, the technical skills demanded of infrastructure teams increase commensurately.

Several roles are particularly crucial, including the following.

Electrical Engineers: Data center electrical distribution systems reaching scales of more than 50 MW require highly skilled engineering oversight during construction and daily management.

Project Managers: AI data center builds have become enormously complex multi-year projects that demand top-tier project managers to seamlessly oversee integration, procurement, budgets, and timelines.

IT Administrators: Managing the intricate configurations and interconnections of high-end networking, storage and computing hardware for AI merits specialized technicians and administrators.

Data Center Mechanics: Facility mechanics can maintain and optimize complex mechanical systems like high-density cooling, essential for smooth operations.

Developers: Software engineers who can program management systems to monitor massive-scale IT infrastructure are needed to maximize uptime and efficiency.

Government initiatives, industry partnerships and in-house development programs engaging tech students and veterans can all play essential roles in developing robust high-tech labor pools for the AI infrastructure era.
Learn more about how AI will impact infrastructure by downloading our AI whitepaper.