DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

Sustainability needs to be applied at all levels of the data center industry, and we are not doing enough, says John Booth of Carbon3IT. 

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we sit down with sustainability consultant John Booth to talk about how he got where he is in his career, and the fundamental sustainability issues that he is seeing in the data center industry. 

We also talk about a past trip to Belarus that proved more exciting than expected. Tune in now for the latest episode.

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. 

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.

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.

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.  

Ever wondered about the practical challenges of connecting our continents?

In this podcast episode, we talk with Exa Infrastructure's Elena Badiola about the process of getting subsea cables underwater: from environmental surveys to climate change, to funding challenges.

Elena also shares her experience of living on a cable ship for five weeks after an earthquake caused an outage - and how a military coup almost stopped her from getting back home.

In 2022, Mark Monroe's podcast about hydrogen was one of our most popular podcasts ever.

At Microsoft, Mark had just made a prototype hydrogen fuel cell UPS system that could potentially replace diesel generators to provide low-carbon backup power at data centers. One year on, he's back for some more detail.

A hydrogen economy will need a distribution system - but will that look like a power network, a gas grid, or a system of trucks? 

Data centers won't be the first big users of hydrogen: Mark tells us where it will take off. 

This year, we've heard stories of natural hydrogen mined from underground. Mark assesses that prospect, along with the other sources of hydrogen, and suggests that the new energy source could rewrite the world's map of energy providers.

Listen to our talk with Mark to find out where and when you will start using hydrogen. 

If you think transitioning the tech sector to net zero is all about renewable energy and heat reuse, think again. Small changes in software could make entire data centers redundant - for a much bigger saving for the planet. 

Green Software is not just about more efficient code, says Anne Currie. Rewriting everything in C might cut energy use - but it would destroy your company.  

As a leader in the Green Software Foundation, and a seasoned green developer and entrepreneur, Anne has much better ideas. She is working with Sarah Hsu and Sara Bergman, on Building Green Software, an O'Reilly book about what green software really means, and how we can achieve it. 

Find out more in this podcast.

How does the Internet keep running? A close-knit community of engineers has been developing and supporting the protocols that support it for more than forty years.

During that time, new Internet services have emerged and scaled beyond recognition, and new features have been added, all without breaking the whole system. 

Mirjam Kuhne has been closely involved with this for 20 years, and in 2020 became chair of the European forum for Internet development -  RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens, French for "European IP Networks"). 

Since then, Internet services have become crucial to the continued operation of society during the pandemic, and European Internet services have faced unprecedented technical and political challenges during the war in Ukraine. 

Mirjam says the protocols take care of themselves. What you need is a community of motivated engineers to maintain them. RIPE is open to new members, and when you hear how it all works, why wouldn't you get involved?

Quantum computing is still pretty mysterious, but data center operators have real questions: when will they need installation and support? And how much cooling will they need?

Chris Monroe, chief scientist at IonQ, gives us the answers, along with plenty of other solid facts about an emerging technology that can seem as illusory as Schrodinger's cat. 

It turns out that quantum computing is reaching a point where lots of us could soon start to use it. The market may have to choose from an array of different kinds of quantum bits (or "qubits"), but it is quite likely that a brand new quantum computer could fit into a couple of racks of your classical data center.

Don't believe us? Let Chris explain... 

There has been an ongoing issue with the representation of women in the tech industry, but why?

In this episode, we talk to Kelley Mullick about her career to date, the factors that have helped her get to where she is, and the importance of supporting and empowering women to pursue these careers so they can find confidence within themselves.

We also talk a little about her recent job change from Intel to vice president of technology advancement and alliances at Iceotope - what drew her to the company and why she thinks precision liquid cooling is the future.

Having trouble finding a location for your data center project? This DCD podcast could have the answer. Build underground. 

Andrew Bourget of Swiss engineering firm Eccus has a design for a 2MW data center built in an underground tunnel - and he can dig that tunnel wherever you want it, even under existing buildings. 

The way he tells it, tunneling is the future. There's no planning permission required, and you can build under your existing facility. You can migrate underground, and still have your above-ground space available for offices or to rent out. Is he serious?

Time will tell. He's currently working on projects in Switzerland and France - with his eye on London, where the clay subsoil is apparently ideal for underground data center vaults. 

In March this year, a swimming pool in Devon, UK, was the unlikely setting for the most widely covered data center story (so far) of 2023. 

A small immersion-cooled high-performance computing module from Deep Green is giving its heat to the swimming pool, saving Exmouth Leisure Centres £20,000 ($24,000) per year.

It's not the first time data center waste heat has been harnessed. It's not even the first time it has heated a swimming pool. But Deep Green CEO Mark Bjornsgaard tells us that, this time, all the pieces are in place to make the idea mainstream. 

In the future, he asks, why should the heat from any computing be wasted?

Put it another way: if all our heating needs were produced by GPUs and CPUs, that would provide way more computing power than we currently know how to use.  

Cloud gaming was heralded as the future of games, and was set to become a major data center workload. Now, after the death of Google Stadia and layoffs at Amazon's Luna, what's left for data center gaming? We catch up with Omdia's George Jijiashvili to discuss all things gaming, as well as VR, AR, and a dash of the metaverse.

As 2030 approaches, the pressure on data centers to meet their carbon pledges continues to increase. This, compounded with the challenge of energy supply insecurity and rising costs, is driving data centers to look to new methods of powering their operations, which has triggered nuclear power to come to the fore. However, as a result of historical disasters as well as the upfront costs, there is hesitancy in the data center industry to make the move to nuclear.

This podcast will take a deep dive into the future of nuclear in the data center market, and explore how the heavy regulation of this industry makes it a safe and reliable method of energy generation. However, despite there being some clear use cases of its viability, we are many years off from nuclear becoming a widely used power source owing to its economic feasibility. This begs the questions: when will it be deployed at scale? What is the practicality of SMRs? What technology will be used to bridge the gap as we wait for a nuclear solution?

As data center demands grow, hyperscalers are building out vast networks that will help define the future of how infrastructure is interconnected. In the latest episode of the DCD Zero Downtime podcast, we connect with Juniper Networks' group vice president of cloud-ready data center, Mike Bushong, to discuss what this means, and what we should expect next. Plus we discuss AI, silicon photonics, telecoms, the race to 800G, and more.

Recently there’s been a number of mobile operators switching off their 3G networks around the world, or scheduling to phase out this old technology.

2G has also been spoken about at length, but has a slightly longer shelf-life than 3G, as it provides a backbone that still supports the IoT industry today.

But what does any of this mean, and why does it matter? Well, Wireless Logic Group Chief Product Officer Paul Bullock explains why the need to switch off 3G is necessary for the future of 5G.

It’s not just 5G, he adds, noting that IoT will gain a lot from the switch off of this service, although he acknowledges that 2G will be more of a challenge to phase out.

Tune in to listen to the full discussion...

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.

Join us for an extended discussion with CTO and founder of North American Access Technologies Julius Neudorfer about the history of liquid cooling, and where he sees the market developing in the future.

Formed by DigitalBridge and Liberty Global, AtlasEdge has quickly become one of the Edge industry's largest players. We chat to COO Zahl Limbuwala about how it defines the Edge and where it places its servers.

For years, operators have been trying to make their data centers more efficient by optimizing the cooling and power distribution in the facility - and have more or less ignored the IT equipment in the racks.

PUE - the most popular data center metric - simply optimized the ancillary equipment, trying to approach a "perfect" figure of 1.0, where all the power goes into the rack.

But what if you could measure the power used by your IT equipment, run comparative tests, and find out how to reconfigure, replace or update your hardware to improve energy efficiency?

Rich Kenny claims to be able to do that. Interact started as a project by refurbished hardware supplier TechBuyer, aiming to prove that refurbished hardware could be as good as new kit, and grew into a consultancy that compares hardware configurations, and gives guidance on how to do more with less hardware.

Server manufacturers do their business on the basis that new hardware is always more efficient than old hardware, and colo providers would rather you didn't find out that you could do away with half the racks you are renting.

Kenny is shining a light into a dark corner that has not had enough exposure, dissecting the 1 in that PUE figure. He could be about to step on some industry toes...

In this episode, we talk to Cloudflare's CTO John Graham-Cumming about how to respond to an outage at your company. We also discuss why the company bans the use of the word "Edge," and talk about the company's 'Supercloud.'

Can light be used to compute? We talk to Nick Harris, CEO of chip startup Lightmatter, about how the company hopes to harness photons for AI computing and as a data center interconnect.

What does a technologist do at a real estate company? We talk to Digital Realty's CTO Chris Sharp about the importance of understanding both bits and bricks, discuss the company's interconnection efforts, and do a quickfire round on which future technologies will transform the data center.

Most people think the Internet of Things is a recent idea, maybe dating to around the year 2000.  In fact, the idea is some 15 years older than that.

In 1985, the Internet was officially two years old. It linked up some 2000 hosts, and a handful of people used email. In that year, cellular phones were the size of bricks, and almost no one had one. And yet, in 1985, Peter T Lewis predicted the two could be combined, so devices could communicate over wireless links.

"I predict that not only humans, but machines and other things will interactively communicate via the Internet," he said. "The Internet of Things, or IoT, is the integration of people, processes, and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring, status, manipulation, and evaluation of trends of such devices."

Listen to our podcast to find out how Lewis made this astonishingly accurate prediction, years ahead of his time. in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 1985. We also find out how his ideas were almost forgotten, and what he thinks of today's IoT.

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.

As grids around the world struggle to meet demand amid heatwaves and wars, data center power and water usage is increasingly coming under scrutiny. We talk to the researcher who has spent years trying to track the sector's consumption, so that regulators and companies alike can access accurate figures on a secretive sector.

What's it like building facilities for Google, in the epicenter of data center construction - Northern Virginia?  Sarah Godbehere has spent the last three years managing construction on a Google campus in Northern Virginia. She tells us what it's like to be a young woman in an industry full of older men, and shares how she turns potential conflicts by asking the right questions.

When a data center firm claims to be 100 percent carbon neutral, can we believe them?  Does every electron used in that data come from a solar panel or a wind farm?   Until we have reliable carbon accounting, we won't know for sure, and operators will continue to rely on renewable energy certificates (RECs) which match energy consumption over a year, instead of hour by hour.

Simone Accornero, CEO of FlexiDAO says we need "RECs on steroids" to move to hourly carbon accounting, and a blockchain-based protocol can deliver this without costing the earth in energy overheads.

Data centers are a small part of the global electricity market, Accornero says they are ideally suited to drive that market to better carbon accounting, and renewable generation which better matches electricity consumption.

As sustainability continues to become an increasingly important issue for data center owners and operators, many are tying their financing into ESG-related goals. The likes of Green Bonds see proceeds going towards specific green projects, while Sustainability-Linked Loans see interest payments tied to specific targets such as PUE or water use.

Such financing options have been adopted by cloud and data center companies including Equinix, Digital Realty, Atos, Baidu, AirTrunk, and telcos such as Telefonica, NTT, and Verizon.   

US operator Aligned’s whole debt pile – more than $3billion –  is entirely made up of sustainable-tied financing. Aligned’s VP of Finance, Matthew Chambliss discusses the company’s reasoning and journey to adopting sustainable financing.

Cryptocurrency valuations are in freefall, causing mining to halve. But Bitcoin still consumes as much power as entire nations, amid a climate emergency. We talk to Digiconomist's Alex de Vries about the history of crypto, the crash, and learn just how much power the sector uses - and what it means for the planet.

Working from home expanded massively during the pandemic - but were we ready for such a massive change? The proportion of remote workers grew from 17% of all employees worldwide in 2019 to 32% but the companies weren't fully ready for the change and collaboration tools were often pushed beyond what they were designed for. 

Alex Cruz Farmer of Cisco ThousandEyes has the tools to look objectively at the user experience and talks to us about how we can improve it.

The world needs hydrogen as part of the replacement for fossil fuels - and data centers could be the catalyst for that.  

Mark Monroe, Principal Engineer at Microsoft, explains how the hydrogen economy works. He shows us that hydrogen is not just a proven alternative to diesel for backup, but brings other benefits with it. 

If data centers switch this small part of their energy needs to hydrogen, this could enable much larger industries to get started - and catalyze a hydrogen economy

In this episode of the Zero Downtime podcast, we speak to Leaseweb general counsel Jacqueline van de Werken about how to encourage more women in the data center and cloud industry, and how to retain those that do join.

It's easy to think that sustainable data centers are all about reducing carbon. In fact the earth faces a biodiversity crisis as big as the climate crisis. Data centers can have a role in fighting to prevent extinctions, and produce a lot of other benefits in the process.

When you build a data center, you have to see the unintended consequences, says Michelle Wallace of data center promotion group Host In Ireland. Build badly, and local species will suffer. But it's also easy to get it wrong, to put in measures that don't help.

Host in Ireland went to Ireland's National Biodiversity Data Centre, found how important pollinators are, and put together a set of action to protect and promote them, DCs for Bees is now having influence beyond Ireland, and beyond the data center industry.

It's being followed up with a scheme to plant orchards - and there are more ideas beyond that.

This is the Zero Downtime episode which could make your data center into a haven for nature, and change your life for the better!

CTOs have traditionally been key positions for research-driven software and technology companies. As colocation companies increasingly move beyond merely serving space and power, the role of the CTO becomes more important.  

Holland Barry, Field CTO for Cyxtera, discusses the role of the CTO and Field CTO at the company, the key skills required, and some of the interesting projects the company is working on.

We also discuss the wider skills market and the shift from ‘dumb colo’ to service provider, and get a boots on the ground view of Cyxtera’s journey to becoming a public company via a SPAC merger.