Andrew Donoghue – Grounded technology news and analysis
My inaugural ‘Critical Thinking’ column for Data Center Knowledge has just been published. Big thanks to Yevgeniy Sverdlik and the team for the opportunity to be part of such a well-regarded platform as Data Center Knowledge. Head over to DCK to read the full article.
Another in the series on the datacenter services plans of large technology suppliers. This time the focus is on Vertiv and how it has evolved its services strategy since the spin off from Emerson Network Power. It has plans to follow Eaton and Schneider Electric into cloud-based datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) tools which 451 refers to as Datacenter Management as a Service (DMaaS). However, the company says it has had very sophisticated remote monitoring and management tools for more than ten years. (For 451 subscribers)
Another 451 Research report on physical datacenter services looks at what Siemens has developed with partners such as Atos. The German infrastructure giant has invested in datacenter technologies to enable software-driven, remotely delivered IT and facilities services, as well as advanced energy services.
The latest report in an ongoing series on physical datacenter services has been published. German facilities service specialist Apleona, building on Bilfinger’s engineering heritage, plans to expand its datacenter critical infrastructure services. For more go to 451 Research.
Just published on 451 Research (subscribers only)
Environmental group Greenpeace recently released its latest take on the ecological impact of large datacenter operators. In Clicking Clean: A Guide to Building the Green Internet, the organization asserts that while there continue to be some laggards among the pack of large datacenter operators, many have taken decisive steps to improve their environmental stewardship.
In a clear switch of emphasis, Greenpeace reserves the bulk of its criticism for what it describes as a group of monopolistic utilities. The group says these utilities are still not investing sufficiently in renewable energy generation, or creating the kinds of tariffs to incentivize datacenters to use more renewables. Greenpeace devotes less attention to the fact that the relationship between datacenters and utilities is shifting, in some cases dramatically, with implications for renewable energy generation and use. (We examined some of these changes in a recent report).
Just published on 451 Research (for subscribers only)
Colocation datacenter operator Green Mountain Data Centre has two facilities in Norway. Its first facility, DC1, close to Stavanger, Norway, received a Tier III Tier Certification of Constructed Facility from Uptime Institute (a division of The 451 Group) in Q2 2015. The site has been operational since 2013, and its customers include Norway’s largest financial services company. The facility is notable for being built inside a former NATO munitions store. Other innovations include the use of seawater cooling and hypoxic fire suppression.
Many new datacenter builds attempt to accommodate the often competing ambitions of energy efficiency and resiliency. The balance for colocation facilities is even harder to achieve, with customers often demanding high levels of resiliency while mandating PUEs and operational costs commensurate with extreme energy efficiency. Green Mountain appears to have managed what few others have, thanks to the site’s history as a NATO munitions store and the availability of cheap, reliable and low-carbon hydropower. The addition of seawater cooling helps to further reinforce the facility’s green credentials.
HP thinks so. They don’t have any specific product plans but they talked me through how their existing Apollo 8000 high compute server system could be adapted to cool networking equipment and potentially eventually storage.
Here’s an excerpt from my report.
“Nearly a year after the launch of its liquid-cooled Apollo 8000 server, HP reports strong interest in the system from HPC facilities, as well as some service providers. The company declined to provide specific shipment numbers but notes that it has a healthy pipeline for the 8000. However, HP believes there needs to be a significant readjustment in the budgeting process for datacenter projects – to reflect the capital and energy-efficiency gains from using direct liquid cooling (DLC) – before the technology becomes more widely adopted.
The company is also considering how to apply its take on DLC technology to its networking and storage systems, as well as those of its partners. This would help overcome one of the roadblocks to greater DLC uptake: although DLC technology has the potential to eliminate the need for mechanical air-based cooling for servers, facilities still require some perimeter air cooling for networking and storage systems.”
451 Research clients can get the full report here:
Am looking forward to attending my first Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California next week.
Aside from escaping the European winter for a week, the line-up of speakers looks great and it seems the event is morphing it one of the must-attend events (along with Green Grid US, Datacenter Dynamics London, Uptime Symposium US) in the datacenter calendar.
I am there principally on a fact-finding, and bridge-building, mission representing the European Commission-funded CoolEmAll project. The project is entering its final phase and we are keen to establish tighter links with industry initiatives such as Open Compute so that the research and technology developed in the project can be exploited by others, as well as adhere to industry standards.
I will also be interested to hear the panel discussion on the use of renewable energy in the datacenter which fits with the another EU project – RenewIT – in which 451 is involved. It’s still early days for RenewIT as the project only kicked off last November, but it’s good to see the use of renewable energy being debated at events such as Open Compute.
I will be writing up a number of reports for 451 Research on the event and will provide summaries and links to those in the coming weeks.
Iceotope is a UK-based company I have been tracking since it first emerged in 2009, and then disappeared, before resurfacing in 2012 backed by Peter Hopton (of VeryPC fame). I had been aware of the concept of cooling datacenters with liquid rather than air – the technology dates back to the mainframe era – but it has largely remained a niche technology only found in high performance computing and supercomputing systems. It’s fair to say that Iceotope probably did more than other companies to turn me on to the idea that this could be a disruptive technology in enterprise datacenters too (although there are a lot of reasons why it might not do). So it was good to see this week that others have bought into its approach – to the tune of $10m – including datacenter giant Schneider Electric. I will be following up with Iceotope later this week and am also working on a Long Format Report for 451 Research on the 15 plus companies developing direct liquid cooling technology.
I spoke with European datacenter start-up Eco4Cloud a couple of weeks back and the report based on that conversation has just been published (for 451 subscribers) on 451 Research.com. Eco4Cloud (E4C) is a spinoff from the Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) and the University of Calabria. The company has developed software designed to deal with virtual machine (VM) sprawl and low server-utilization rates. E4C’s software effectively automates the real-time consolidation of VMs onto the minimum number of physical servers. The remaining servers, with a low number of VMs or none at all, can be power-managed dynamically based on workload variations, or even retired. E4C has received early stage funding from two external investors, and is looking to attract new investment and partners in 2014.
EARTHED-TECH 
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