Inside data center monitoring hubs

Steady attention is crucial when keeping watch over hundreds of data centers worldwide, facilities essential to online banking, messaging and artificial intelligence (AI) services that society uses.

Analysts are surrounded by digital maps and dashboards at the Singapore operations center of US firm Digital Realty Trust Inc, a global operator of the warehouse-like sites filled with whirring servers.

The goal is not simply to react when something breaks, but to detect warning signs, such as a sudden rise in temperature, early enough to prevent disruption.

Analysts monitor operations at the Digital Realty data office in Singapore on Sept. 2.

Photo: AFP

Daniel Naing, 37, and his colleagues at the center in Singapore handle thousands of system alerts flagging signs of trouble each week.

The operations center and its two sister hubs, in Europe and the US, provide round-the-clock oversight of more than 300 data centers across six continents.

Digital Realty rents its server space to about 6,000 companies, with power loss and equipment failure the most common issues.

There are procedures for earthquakes and typhoons, and an approaching storm thousands of kilometers away is enough to put the team on standby.

Demand for data centers is a political hot potato in many places, as tech companies race to develop AI tools that require massive amounts of computing power.

Without them “nothing works” in our high-tech world, Digital Realty managing director and Asia Pacific head Serene Nah said.

Data centers are essential infrastructure — a matter “almost like national security,” she said.

“We need to be up running all the time.”

However, Nah said that “our business is very misunderstood” and has little support from the public, who believe data centers emit “a lot of carbon or heat” or “use up a lot of water.”

“Yet everyone’s scrolling their phones every day,” and for each swipe “the data needs to go somewhere.”

The company is prioritizing renewable energy such as solar panels and closed-loop server cooling systems that continuously recycle water, Nah said.

Data centers operate 24 hours a day, so the Singapore center takes the 7am to 7pm shift before hand-off to Europe.

Engineers must respond to an alert within minutes. The teams liaise with on-site staff and call on a global network of experts to help, while keeping clients updated.

The company’s operations center in Singapore is housed inside one of three data centers that the company runs in the city-state.

Most areas of the data center, whose roof is lined with solar panels, are off-limits for security reasons.

AFP was shown a room where rows of black server cabinets formed long, narrow corridors, with bundles of yellow cables running overhead and the computer servers’ high-velocity fans emitting a soft hum.

AI is accelerating the growth and complexity of data centers, but for the operations center, humans remain indispensable, said Terence Tang, head of the Asia Pacific global command center.

“We still need human intervention to really look at whether or not those are genuine outages, genuine alerts and alarms, because sometimes AI or automation can give you false positives,” Tang said.