DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show
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DCD Zero Downtime is DCD's editorially-led podcast. In each episode, our editorial team will be talking with leading members of the data center and digital infrastructure community, delving deeper into the future of the industry and its major challenges.
54 Episodes
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As land and power in Virginia's Loudoun County become increasingly scarce, data center developers are seeking fresh ground on which build. While many are moving south within Virginia to the likes of Prince William County, Quantum Loophole is hoping to lure companies north into Maryland.
A former aluminum smelting works, the company's maiden campus is reportedly luring cloud companies and the hyperscale developers serving them on a huge scale.
CEO Josh Snowhorn talks us through the company's history and its 2,000+acre gigawatt project located just north from Loudoun across the Potomac river.
Oxide Computer has been rebuilding the rack. In this podcast, CTO Bryan Cantrill tells us why.
The data center industry has been building its own infrastructure for years, with the wrong components.
Servers weren't designed to be operated in data centers, and the 1U rack unit is the wrong size, because of simple science. Part of the success of the cloud is that it takes that integration away, and gives users an easily consumed set of virtual servers and elastic infrastructure. But it costs, and it has pushed users to renting something they would be better off owning. That's why we heard of the "cloud diaspora" - organizations people bringing their IT back from the cloud.
But what people need, Cantrill says, is an elastic infrastructure for the on-premise facility. In this podcast, you can hear him explaining why his team found they had to rebuild almost everything to deliver it.
After a hiatus of several years, climate change policy is taking off in the US, with the Biden-Harris Administration using the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energy Earthshot to accelerate the clean energy economy.
But data center energy policy goes back a lot further than that. Stephen Harper, Intel's Global Director, Environment and Energy Policy, was there 20 years ago when data centers first came onto the climate change radar, and he's been tracking progress since then.
As well as their own emissions "footprint", data centers have a positive impact on emissions elsewhere, known as the environmental "handprint"
But how do we measure that handprint, and set it against the negative impact of infrastructure.
And coming after this backstory, just what impact of these Biden-Harris initiatives have?
DCD speaks to Stephen about the likely impact of historic climate legislation for the digital infrastructure sector.
Efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our digital world tend to start with the cooling systems at data centers, and rarely get any further.
The tech industry created PUE as a simple metric which could express how efficiently power is delivered to the racks, but did not consider what happens to that power when it gets there.
That’s not good enough, because poorly written software could be wasting that power in unnecessary loops and fruitless calculations.
The Green Software Foundation has emerged to propose a measure of Software Carbon Intensity that will tell developers if their software is a good planetary citizen.
But this is an issue that gets more complex, the more you look at it. Software that completes quickly must save energy, but what if the software is running on multiple hardware platforms? What about the embodied energy of the hardware you choose for it?
David Mytton is Co-founder & CEO of Console, a company that makes tools for developers. He’s also looked at the energy used in technology, bothy at Imperial College and at the Uptime Institute.
He’s now working on a PhD in sustainable computing at the University of Oxford.
He talks to us about the prospects for Green Software finding its way from academic research, through sponsorship by large vendors, into the hands of developers and consumers.
Data center automation is one thing, but what about automatons walking in the data halls? Robots in the data center are often discussed but rarely make it beyond the pilot project stage. Those that are deployed are often closer to Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 than Neill Blomkamp's CHAPPiE.
Utah-based Novva data centers has deployed Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog – possibly the most advanced robot that is currently commercially available – at its flagship data center and is looking to create a replicable and scalable model for deploying robots in its other current and future facilities. DCD discusses the pains of deploying a robot that is still a way off enterprise-ready plug-and-play with CEO Wes Swenson along with the lack of a wider support ecosystem for robotic deployments, and the future role of humans in the data center.
Figures quoted in 2021 suggested that data centers and communications technology could use eight percent or even 20 percent of the world's electricity by 2030. That seemed too high to us, so we tracked down the original source of the quotes, only to find he feels the same way. Anders Andrae is an academic, currently working at Huawei's Swedish R&D center. Since his original 2015 paper he has revised his predictions down, but the old figures still often show up out of context. More importantly, he thinks we should be looking at the benefits of IT as well as the energy cost. He talks of a "handprint" that counter-balances the environmental "footprint". Andrae says the Internet saves far more emissions, through offering a digital alternative to physical services, than it consumes.
You can find Andrae's research here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anders-Andrae
Data centers are about as efficient as they ever can be, in terms of delivering power to servers and keeping them cool, so what's the next step to sustainable digital infrastructure? There is a lot of talk about reusing the wasted heat that facilities produce, but this seems like a hard job when all too often they can't give it away for free.
Max Schulze is the founder of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA), a group of stakeholders aiming to achieve a sustainable digital infrastructure by 2030. He thinks the answer to heat reuse is economics, not engineering.
And when we've sorted that out, he foresees that the big cloud providers will be disaggregated, and the cloud will become the same kind of market as the electricity grid.
In the first episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we sit down with Lex Coors, winner of DCD's 2021 Outstanding Contribution to the Industry award and Chief Data Center Technology & Engineering Officer for Interxion.
We spoke to Lex about his two decades at the company, from the early days, to the rise of cloud, and the recent Digital Realty acquisition. We also discussed sustainability efforts, the European energy crisis, and how to ensure that local communities don't turn against data centers.
Bringing the L to FLAP-D, the UK has a prominent data center market. But like all other tier-one markets, London is struggling with space and power capacity. Because of this, the UK's data center industry will have to diversify, all while meeting increasingly regimented regulations. In this episode, we talk to trade association TechUK's Luisa Cardani about what the UK's data center industry is currently experiencing, from upcoming rules and regulations to emerging new markets, to the association's role in influencing policy.
Think hard drives have hit their storage limits, and should be replaced by solid-state units? You could be wrong.
Hard drives have been holding our data for nearly 70 years since IBM created the 350, which stored something like 4 Mbyte on dozens of spinning disks in a unit the size of a washing machine.
Today's devices are orders of magnitude better on every axis including price, capacity, size, and performance. But solid-state providers say it's time they moved over to make way for modern storage. Hard drives have been in a slump, but a new technique promises to double their capacity.
Seagate is the first to bring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to the market, so we invited chief commercial officer B S Teh to tell us why it is such a big deal, why it's taken so long - and how it could change what you do in your data center.
In this episode of Zero Downtime, we break down the fundamentals of quantum computing - the different approaches out there, the challenges to bringing it into a widespread commercial reality, and the potential use cases that quantum may help with.
To help divulge this, we speak to QuEra's Yuval Boger who shares a little about the company's experience with the technology, including how we can go about deploying quantum computers inside data centers.
25 years ago, the first content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged, to solve a specific problem - how to make web pages load faster.
More than two decades later, 72 percent of Internet content is delivered through CDNs. But the companies involved are still almost invisible - until something goes wrong.
In 2021, in a series of outages, large numbers of unrelated websites all went out of action at the same time. It turned out that these sites had all come to rely on the same
CDNs, effectively installing a single point of failure for large sections of the Internet.
Since then, large service providers have worked out how to avoid this problem - and one CDN provider told us in a podcast what to do when it does happen.
Major CDN players have extended into a distributed cloud role, running applications at the edge, and Cloudflare, for one, believes CDNs have a huge opportunity in "inference" - when AI pre-trained systems are deployed for actual applications.
2021 also saw the formation of the CDN Alliance, an industry body that aims to be a voice and forum for CDN players, along with the ecosystem that has grown up around them.
Mark de Jong, founder and chair of the CDN Alliance, tells us why CDNs need a voice, and what they need to be saying.
Europe has an Energy Efficiency Directive, Germany has an Energy Efficiency Act, and operators there can be fined for inefficiency.
Meanwhile, Amsterdam has declared war on sleeping servers, and set limits on where facilities can be built. Across Europe, in response to congested electric grids and shortages of land, local governments are stepping in to regulate data centers.
Sometimes they want them to be greener, sometimes they want them to be quieter, and sometimes they just want them somewhere else. But any data center operator now has to be prepared to meet new reporting requirements and talk to the local authorities about their business.
This is not a bad thing, says Venessa Moffat, head of channel partner manager EMEA Europe for EkkoSense. It's about time those discussions happened.
People who run cities need to understand the businesses that are located there - and from those discussions, new partnerships can emerge.
At the start of 2023, Yuval Bachar told us about his latest project - to build off-grid, hydrogen-powered data centers. As 2023 came to an end, he was back to tell us he'd done it.
He's got 1MW of capacity fed by hydrogen in Mountain View California, and he's telling potential customers he can build the same thing anywhere you can get hydrogen shipped by pipe or tanker.
He's keen on the benefits. No long waits for power distribution, no struggles getting permits for diesel. And the building is quick and cheap too. He can make them with a 3D concrete printer - which incidentally is environmentally better than tilt-up building, he says.
He picked up the Environmental Impact prize at this year's DCD Awards, and joined the podcast to give us some more details on what he has done.... and what's coming next
Ever wonder what it would be like to be a CEO at a telecom company in a country that is at war?That’s been the reality on a couple of occasions for Ineke Botter, who has headed telecom companies in Kosovo and Lebanon. Her career has taken across Europe and beyond, spanning more than 30 years. She’s even worked in the data center industry too. Listen to find out more about Ineke’s incredible journey into telecoms.
The European data center market has a forecasted take-up of 440MW for 2023. But within the context of erratic power availability, moratoriums, and the need to move to renewable energy, the FLAP-D markets are facing several challenges.
In this episode we talk to Neal Kalita about the obstacles facing those looking to build in Europe, and what the future holds for the region.
Tune in for the conversation where we find the solution to keeping up with the pace of demand while prioritizing sustainability.
Data centers need to be more sustainable, but finding consistent and powerful energy resources can be a challenge.
Increasingly, we are seeing nuclear entering the conversation, in the form of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). But these aren't without their own controversies.
In this episode, we talk with Compass Datacenters' Tony Grayson to discuss the future of SMRs, the challenges and opportunities, and the role we can expect them to play in the world of data centers.
Artificial intelligence could grow from almost nothing to using half a percent of the world's electrical power within five years, according to Alex de Vries of Digiconomist.
That's a crazy rate of growth, but it's not unprecedented. Bitcoin followed almost exactly the same trajectory, expanding from nothing to a sector whose energy use is comparable with that of regular data centers. But the similarities end there, says de Vries, who provided the reliable tracking data for the growth of Bitcoin, and is ready to do the same for AI.
A year ago, he talked us through his methodology for analyzing Bitcoin energy usage. Now he's back, explaining how we can estimate the consumption of AI systems, This time round, it's all about tracking how many GPUs Nvidia can make, and seeing where they are likely to end up.
The actual figure depends on a lot of things, and could be higher if more GPUs emerge, or if they are deployed differently. There are questions around the depreciation of the hardware, and how and where AI inference is delivered.
Listen in to find out how AI's thirst for power is going to affect the world.
We talk to Bill Kleyman, now at machine learning company Neu.ro, about his lengthy data center career. How did he get into the sector, what did he learn at Switch, and how does he balance life and travel? Tune in to find out.
Data centers have outgrown their anonymity. They are large enough consumers of energy and space, that they have to enter the political landscape and justify their existence. But how do we know if a data really brings benefits to its location?
In some places (like London), it appears that they soak up grid connection capacity and block housing projects. In others (like Denmark and Ireland) they use renewable energy and jeopardize local decarbonization targets.
It's not easy to know the net benefits brought by a data center, because much of what it does is in the virtual world, and is delivered to people far away.
Max Schulze has some thoughts on how to start working out the real benefits of a data center - and we hope for more input from DCD readers and listeners.
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