Morning all, it’s Taylor from Cold Isle (Again!), give me 5 minutes to make you smarter about the infrastructure that’s creating the future. Let’s Jump in.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• 2022 was huge for Data Centers, but now what?

• A look into SoFi Stadium’s personal data center

• What I’m reading this morning

• Daily DAL-E 🎨

A Look Back at 2022 and What’s Next

As you probably are aware, the data center market went absolutely off last year.  

The guys and gals at CBRE put together a round-up of the last year in the DC world. Here are a few of their key numbers:

• Supply grew 17% to over 3,928MW, but it’s slowing.

• It’s become a power game. As power issues arise, access to power has become significantly more important. It’s probably became leading factor in determining the scale and locations of developments in 2022.
  

• Price (kW/month) rose dramatically in 2022, totally breaking the long-term trend of falling prices.
  

  

• .The construction pipeline is filled to the gills. It was up 153% of y-o-y.

• Vacancy rates are at an all-time low of 3.2%. The overall vacancy rate decreased in every primary market except for Silicon Valley. This is despite the current economic climate and all of the uncertainty that it implies.

• Fiber is out of control. The federal infrastructure bill has been a boon for telecommunications. More fiber is being laid than has been in years and it’s not slowing down.

So 2022 was great, but what’s on the horrizon?

I think it’s clear we are likely to see a more expensive and slow-moving expansion and development pipeline over the coming year and beyond.
Supply chains are moving more slowly, capital is becoming more expensive, and economic uncertainty is going to be with us for the foreseeable short-term.

Luckily, with profit horizons as wide and future-forward, as they are in the data center market, data centers are going to remain resilient to economic conditions. But the market is going to crawl forward for at least the next 18 months.

SoFi’s Personal DC (Data Cornucopia)

In 2019, with 9 months before opening, SoFi implored HKS architects to redesign the existing Distributed Antenna System (DAS) to accommodate a massive increase in the capacity of the stadium and it’s expected future retail district.

Here are some of the challenges Skarpi Hedinson, CTO at SoFi Stadium, faces running this data behemoth:

• Every transaction at Sofi is cashless and runs through the network.

• Zero paper tickets at SoFi, every ticket is digitally scanned and processed.

• A Capacity of 70k-100k fans posting on socials, sending texts and emails, and taking calls.

• 1000s of vendors processing 100,000s of transactions over several hours
   
  ** Oh yeah and all of this is expected to go off without an outage or delay…

Great, so how do they pull this off?

They deployed a full-stack, single-converged Cisco network running the data center and broadcast networks built on Nexus 9000 switches.
Instead of deploying hundreds of servers to manage this, they used virtualization and Cisco Hyperflex infrastructure to run the whole thing on a handful of servers.
The rest of the network is connected by 229 telecom rooms and pedastals, all of which collapse down to two racks.

SoFi has the largest wifi network of any sports stadium in the world. Using Web6 gives them the reliability and power efficiency to manage that network across all of their more than 2500 access points. (Oh yeah they also have the only 4K live production facility in the US 🤷)

What’s all this infrastructure get you?

• Avg data consumption (football game): 18-24TB

• Avg data consumption (concert): 20-32TB

• Avg per customer: 533MB

• Avg concurrent fans on the network: 69%
  
  * It does not however ensure you that your football team is anygood…

Daily Dal-E

I think we’re safe from our AI overlords for now…