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Many universities and academic institutions use data centers for a wide range of purposes: secure data storage for student and faculty information, learning management systems, and administrative operations. Universities also use data centers for research and data analysis. Research, simulations, machine learning models, and data analysis all require high-performance compute.

Data center capacity planning concerns are growing. The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2026 reveals that the share of data center managers and operators who are at least somewhat concerned about forecasting future capacity requirements has risen from 68% in 2024 to 76% in 2026. Data center professionals are caught between accelerating business demands, aggressive artificial intelligence rollouts, higher-density GPU clusters, and intense scrutiny over power and cooling.

Power Usage Effectiveness has long been used as a metric to calculate data center efficiency. For roughly the last two decades, this popular metric has been used to manage data centers throughout the world. In Singapore, arguably one of the leading data center hubs in Southeast Asia with 1.4 gigawatts capacity, future PUE limits are likely to force operators of both new and existing data centers to modify their facilities and how they are managed.

Managing AI infrastructure in a traditional enterprise data center comes down to validating that sufficient capacity exists before hardware arrives, then maintaining accurate infrastructure data to support planning, deployment, troubleshooting, and ongoing operations. This is because AI has changed what enterprise data centers were built to handle.

NetBox is an open-source platform used for network infrastructure management and documentation, helping organizations track networks, devices, IP addresses, circuits, and racks. Sunbird’s new NetBox connector programmatically pulls device, port, and cabling data from NetBox into dcTrack using a preconfigured base XML connector, driving automation and giving you a single pane of glass and single source of truth across your entire infrastructure.

Across the United States, data center projects are being stalled, local governments are putting ordinances in place to limit data center buildouts, all because people hate data centers. Due to community pushback, in Q1 2026 alone, over $130 billion’s worth of AI data center projects has been blocked or delayed.

Idle resources in your data center are a liability. Every unused server drawing power, every underutilized rack consuming cooling capacity, and every stranded port sitting dark on a switch represents money spent with no operational return. That's always been true for traditional compute. It's even more consequential as organizations invest in GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, where the hardware is an order of magnitude more expensive and the cost of underutilization scales accordingly.

Europe is in the middle of one of its most severe heat events on record, and the effects go well beyond public health. As temperatures across France, Spain, the UK, and Germany push into record territory, the strain on power grids, cooling systems, and physical infrastructure is becoming impossible to ignore. For data center operators, maintaining uptime in this environment demands the real-time visibility that modern Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software can provide.

Choosing a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform is one of the more consequential decisions a data center team will make. Get it right, and you gain an accurate digital twin of your physical infrastructure, a single source of truth across teams, improved operational visibility, and a platform for planning, reporting, and automation. Get it wrong, and you risk a failed deployment, a platform that doesn't fit your needs, or a shelfware investment that's hard to justify renewing.

Dell OpenManage Enterprise (OME) is a management and monitoring application that provides information about Dell servers, chassis, storage, and network switches across the enterprise network. Sunbird’s new Dell OME connector programmatically pulls data from Dell OME into dcTrack, driving automation and giving you a single pane of glass with complete information across all your Dell assets.