Digital Twins: A Pivotal Win for Data Centers?

Digital twins may not hit the market at scale for several years, but they have transformative potential for data center planning.

As companies invest in their digital infrastructures, they’re doing more than simply enriching their relationships with the virtual world—they’re laying the groundwork for more productive relationships with their physical assets. Indeed, advances in emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to dramatically improve the way companies design, produce, and monitor the physical world.

This digitally-driven approach to asset management is known as “digital twinning”—digital twins being digital reproductions of product designs, manufacturing processes, and/or physical objects. Driven by increasing investment in smarter manufacturing and monitoring practices, the global digital twinning market is predicted to rise in value from $3 billion in 2018 to more than $20 billion by 2025.

While digital twins have emerged as invaluable additions to the toolboxes of industrial engineers in high-stakes fields such as aerospace, the basic technology behind them isn’t new. In fact, NASA was an early adopter of the concept of digital twins, pioneering them at the height of the space race to model how various scenarios might affect their designs. NASA created meticulously detailed digital analogues of their spacecrafts and used them to plan for any number of situations they might encounter in space.

A half-century later, IoT sensors and AI have the potential to make digital twins even more accurate and, thus, even more valuable. And while they’re primarily used in industrial design and maintenance at the moment, it’s clear that digital twins may well revolutionize the way IT professionals design, deploy, and monitor assets across their companies—and within their data centers in particular.

What Are Digital Twins?

Digital twins are virtual representations of something that exists in the physical world. It’s easiest to think of them in reference to specific objects like a car or a jet engine, but they can also be designed to mirror systems and processes—and even people and geographic locations.

Digital twins are modeled through a precise process that maps the constituent parts of a physical thing, the way the thing works, and how it might be affected over time. To do so, expert designers leverage advanced physics, machine learning algorithms, and data sourced from IoT sensors to build a data-informed, multi-dimensional model that can predict how something will behave under certain conditions and/or over a certain period of time.

Where Are Digital Twins Being Used?

Generally speaking, there are three types of digital twins. The first—product digital twins—help engineers understand how products will perform in the real world (and make adjustments accordingly). Product twins help companies avoid costly mistakes down the line by allowing them to identify issues and implement fixes digitally before physical production has begun.

The next two—production digital twins and performance digital twins—offer similar benefits. Production twins allow companies to model manufacturing processes to better predict how certain methodologies will perform. This strategy can be used to avoid expensive downtime and even predict when equipment will need maintenance. Performance twins gather information from smart products and processes that are already in use, allowing engineers to use operational data to both perform ongoing maintenance and fine-tune future product designs.

What Can Digital Digital Twins Do for Data Centers?

At the moment, digital twins are primarily being used by the aerospace and automotive industries. Companies such as Boeing and Airbus have used digital twin technology to predict jet engine behavior during the design process and monitor the performance and safety of products that are already in use. Similarly, car manufacturers are using digital twins to understand vehicle behavior during accidents without having to construct and crash expensive models.

That said, IT professionals have been fairly quick to catch on to the potential use cases for digital twins in data centers—which, it bears noting, have become a mission-critical component of nearly every company’s business strategy. Whether they manage their own data center on site or rely on a colocation provider, it’s essential for companies to understand how their data centers are performing, how potential changes might affect this performance, and what they can do to improve various key metrics—which is where a digital twin comes into play.

For example, digital twins can help data center professionals better understand how cooling, power connectivity, and architecture are affecting overall data center performance. This comprehensive visibility will play an instrumental role in helping data center professionals avoid common capacity planning mistakes and predict issues with power caused by excessive load before they develop into serious problems.

The same technology can also enable them to model new server configurations, predict how new hardware and software will affect operations, and determine how assets can be best deployed. For instance, if data center professionals are considering changing the location of server rows or making a move toward higher-density deployment, digital twins of the data center as a whole and of various components could greatly assist them in predicting what, if any, effects these changes will have on overall performance. Given the immense importance of data center operations in the modern corporate world, it’s difficult to overstate the value of identifying and resolving data center problems at the planning phase—that is, before they start causing issues in the real world.

The Power of a Dynamic Duo

Forward-looking data center professionals are already excited about the potential of digital twinning, but it’s clear that the technology is not quite ready for mainstream adoption. However, when digital twins do become available for individual data center use, they are likely to have a transformative effect on capacity planning, hardware deployment, and more.

Of course, developing and monitoring digital twins will take considerable IT expertise—expertise likely beyond the capacity of the typical IT department. As such, for companies interested in capitalizing on the benefits of digital twinning, working with a trusted colocation provider that has the requisite experience to leverage digital twin technology will be a must.