At a time where data center energy consumption is increasing rapidly, optimization is a must. But it is not self-evident that, apparent obvious technical adjustments actually benefits the datacenter. Matse: "Datacenters must continue to optimize. The magic value here is the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). But how exactly are you going to do that? And what is the result of your optimization? For example, you can lower the cooling water temperature by two degrees, because then you might save money. But what is the impact of this on the data floor? That is hard for a person to quanitfy. Artificial intelligence, a technology that is developing rapidly and has more and more applications, can therefore be a useful tool to improve the availability and efficiency of a datacenter. Matse says: "What we do, together with TNO (Dutch Governmental Sciunce institute), Vortech (data science) and Actiflow (CFD), is making a'digital twin'.

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) has always seemed futuristic, but today there is no shortage of companies offering AI solutions. However, does AI offer tangible business solutions, especially in datacenters? Take for example, the case of monitoring energy usage in a datacenter. In a typical datacenter, the manager has to keep track of hundreds of computer room air conditioners (CRACs) with thermostats and manually adjust them. But, if an AI system was in place, it could learn via the algorithm to automatically adjust the cooling depending on different times of the day along with different utilization rates.