3 business projects that improve the data center industry
Energy consumption of data centers is gradually increasing all over the world, and according to the forecast of the Minister of Energy of Ireland, Alex White, energy consumption will increase by several times in the future. The Minister spoke at the UN climate summit in Paris. Specialists from his department came to the conclusion that it is the data center that will be responsible for most of the demand for electricity in Dublin. This increase in energy consumption is due to the construction of new and expansion of the campuses of existing data centers of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other large companies. Similar situations occur in many international capitals. According to White, one should now take care of the problem of the rapid growth of data center energy consumption and begin to search for the best ways to solve them.
It is possible that the business projects described below can help find a way out and cope with the brewing problem.
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The French company Qarnot Computing has become famous for its non-standard approach to the use of energy. Experts began using a by-product of computing power to heat Parisian houses during the cold winter.
The fact that computing systems produce heat is far from news to computer owners. Large companies, like large research organizations, often resort to third-party assistance from data center owners for high-performance computing that takes time and power. Such a computing infrastructure takes up a lot of space, and also needs large investments in cooling systems, ventilation, and air conditioning. All this equipment protects hardware platforms from overheating.
Founder of Qarnot Computing - Engineer Paul Benoit and his product Q.rad
At the same time, about 9 million French annually did not have enough money to pay for heating energy. And data centers needed a huge amount of electricity for cooling. This situation inspired Qarnot Computing engineers to rethink the concept of data centers. They decided to disperse the array of servers into the houses and apartments of Parisians, as well as other administrative and commercial buildings. Servers have the form of "digital radiators".
Engineers have developed a really interesting enough distributed computing platform. It makes it possible to use the excess heat from the servers to provide hot water supply for real estate objects. The Q.rad devices created by the company are very compact. They are equipped with computing facilities and all necessary auxiliary equipment and can be placed in ordinary residential buildings, apartments or inside administrative, commercial buildings. Q.rad act as a kind of "digital radiators". Qarnot Computing enters into a contract with the property owner according to which the company provides the owner with heat and hot water for free in exchange for permission to place the Q.rad system and provide access to the Internet and power cables. Accordingly, all expenses (payment of bills for electricity, the Internet and other Q.rad necessary for the work), Qarnot Computing takes over.
This approach allows the French to save on the construction of standard data centers, reduce the cost of cooling the compute nodes (by supplying cold water from the heating and water supply systems of buildings) and make maximum use of the resources of their distributed computing platform using cloud technologies, loading each server by an average of 50%. Due to this, IT services for end users will significantly fall in price. At the same time, Qarnot Computing offers customers to create their own distributed computing platforms based on Q.rad devices.
Q.rad blends harmoniously into the interior of a residential apartment
As one of the engineers at Qarnot Computing said:
In early December of this year, the municipality of the city of the Gironde (southwest France) took advantage of this opportunity. A very large order was made for 346 devices, for which officials paid 865 thousand euros. Q.rad devices are going to be installed in a new administrative building, where they will become a kind of “heaters” that heat the room. The deal was announced during the climate summit in Paris.
At the climate summit in Paris also appeared information about the joint work of the two companies. Eaton, with a variety of data center power management solutions, has teamed up with car manufacturer Nissan to develop advanced UPS systems. The new solutions are also expected to be available to data center operators, who are striving, at minimum cost, to increase the security of controlled objects from power outages through the central network.
Data center operators may well use similar UPS systems along with renewable energy sources, which are characterized by inconstancy like the sun and wind. This will minimize power outages from local wind parks and solar farms near the data centers. In this way, the load on the central network will also decrease and the level of environmental performance of computing power will increase.
Companies have already demonstrated interim results of joint work. One of these was the Eaton 93PM UPS system, which includes up to four used Nissan Leaf lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Each of these batteries can store up to 20 kWh of electricity (i.e., the peak capacity of each Eaton 93PM UPS system is 80 kWh). It costs about 10 thousand euros.
UPS Eaton 93PM
UPS Eaton 93PM combines efficiency, reliability, as well as vertical and horizontal scalability with an attractive design. Compact and flexible device is easy to install and manage. UPS Eaton 93PM was created to be placed in the server and engineering areas of modern data centers.
Technical characteristics of the Eaton 93PM UPS:
Rated power: 30-200 kW
Output power factor: 1
Rated voltage: 380, 400, 415 V
Frequency: 50 or 60 Hz
Topology: Double conversion
Efficiency: Efficiency up to 97% in 99% double conversion mode in ESS energy saving mode
Occupied space: with battery 0.5 m²
Configuration: Tower
By the way, Nissan Leaf is the best-selling electric car in the world. Since the appearance of the model on sale (2010), customers of the auto company have bought over 200 thousand of these electric cars. Initially, cars are equipped with batteries for 24 kWh, but after 4-5 years of operation, the capacity is reduced to an average of 80%. Such a decline leads to a reduction in power reserve on one charge and forcing drivers to change the battery. And these used batteries are still able to efficiently store electricity, so they can be used as a cheaper replacement for standard UPS for data centers.
Startup Vapor IO is a fairly promising young company, whose main goal is to supplement the Open Data Center Runtime Environment with an intellectual level Core Operating Runtime Environment (Vapor CORE). Not so long ago, a team of specialists presented the integrated rack system of the Vapor Chamber. It embodies the new approach to the design of the next-generation data center.
Vapor Chamber
Working Conditions Vapor Chamber
A good start helped the company to complete another round of financing, during which it was possible to raise funds for the development of its business from many large and influential investors, such as the financial organization Goldman Sachs and venture capital firm AVX Partners. Representatives of Vapor IO do not yet disclose details regarding the size of the raised amount, but state that they are very pleased with the final figures.
Startup engineers Vapor IO are going to change the concept of equipment placement inside the data center using infrastructure optimization at the rack level. They propose replacing the traditional rows of mounting racks with special cylinders, each of which will combine six wedge-shaped server racks arranged in a circle. Similar designs Vapor IO suggest a significant improvement in data center.
It is possible that the business projects described below can help find a way out and cope with the brewing problem.
')
Qarnot Computing Distributed Computing Platform
The French company Qarnot Computing has become famous for its non-standard approach to the use of energy. Experts began using a by-product of computing power to heat Parisian houses during the cold winter.
The fact that computing systems produce heat is far from news to computer owners. Large companies, like large research organizations, often resort to third-party assistance from data center owners for high-performance computing that takes time and power. Such a computing infrastructure takes up a lot of space, and also needs large investments in cooling systems, ventilation, and air conditioning. All this equipment protects hardware platforms from overheating.
Founder of Qarnot Computing - Engineer Paul Benoit and his product Q.rad
At the same time, about 9 million French annually did not have enough money to pay for heating energy. And data centers needed a huge amount of electricity for cooling. This situation inspired Qarnot Computing engineers to rethink the concept of data centers. They decided to disperse the array of servers into the houses and apartments of Parisians, as well as other administrative and commercial buildings. Servers have the form of "digital radiators".
Engineers have developed a really interesting enough distributed computing platform. It makes it possible to use the excess heat from the servers to provide hot water supply for real estate objects. The Q.rad devices created by the company are very compact. They are equipped with computing facilities and all necessary auxiliary equipment and can be placed in ordinary residential buildings, apartments or inside administrative, commercial buildings. Q.rad act as a kind of "digital radiators". Qarnot Computing enters into a contract with the property owner according to which the company provides the owner with heat and hot water for free in exchange for permission to place the Q.rad system and provide access to the Internet and power cables. Accordingly, all expenses (payment of bills for electricity, the Internet and other Q.rad necessary for the work), Qarnot Computing takes over.
This approach allows the French to save on the construction of standard data centers, reduce the cost of cooling the compute nodes (by supplying cold water from the heating and water supply systems of buildings) and make maximum use of the resources of their distributed computing platform using cloud technologies, loading each server by an average of 50%. Due to this, IT services for end users will significantly fall in price. At the same time, Qarnot Computing offers customers to create their own distributed computing platforms based on Q.rad devices.
Q.rad blends harmoniously into the interior of a residential apartment
As one of the engineers at Qarnot Computing said:
The idea was to place the computing power in the buildings, for the owners of which the heat generated by the servers would be useful.
In early December of this year, the municipality of the city of the Gironde (southwest France) took advantage of this opportunity. A very large order was made for 346 devices, for which officials paid 865 thousand euros. Q.rad devices are going to be installed in a new administrative building, where they will become a kind of “heaters” that heat the room. The deal was announced during the climate summit in Paris.
Eaton and Nissan have teamed up to create cheap energy storage systems in the data center
At the climate summit in Paris also appeared information about the joint work of the two companies. Eaton, with a variety of data center power management solutions, has teamed up with car manufacturer Nissan to develop advanced UPS systems. The new solutions are also expected to be available to data center operators, who are striving, at minimum cost, to increase the security of controlled objects from power outages through the central network.
Data center operators may well use similar UPS systems along with renewable energy sources, which are characterized by inconstancy like the sun and wind. This will minimize power outages from local wind parks and solar farms near the data centers. In this way, the load on the central network will also decrease and the level of environmental performance of computing power will increase.
Companies have already demonstrated interim results of joint work. One of these was the Eaton 93PM UPS system, which includes up to four used Nissan Leaf lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Each of these batteries can store up to 20 kWh of electricity (i.e., the peak capacity of each Eaton 93PM UPS system is 80 kWh). It costs about 10 thousand euros.
UPS Eaton 93PM
UPS Eaton 93PM combines efficiency, reliability, as well as vertical and horizontal scalability with an attractive design. Compact and flexible device is easy to install and manage. UPS Eaton 93PM was created to be placed in the server and engineering areas of modern data centers.
Technical characteristics of the Eaton 93PM UPS:
Rated power: 30-200 kW
Output power factor: 1
Rated voltage: 380, 400, 415 V
Frequency: 50 or 60 Hz
Topology: Double conversion
Efficiency: Efficiency up to 97% in 99% double conversion mode in ESS energy saving mode
Occupied space: with battery 0.5 m²
Configuration: Tower
By the way, Nissan Leaf is the best-selling electric car in the world. Since the appearance of the model on sale (2010), customers of the auto company have bought over 200 thousand of these electric cars. Initially, cars are equipped with batteries for 24 kWh, but after 4-5 years of operation, the capacity is reduced to an average of 80%. Such a decline leads to a reduction in power reserve on one charge and forcing drivers to change the battery. And these used batteries are still able to efficiently store electricity, so they can be used as a cheaper replacement for standard UPS for data centers.
Startup Vapor IO
Startup Vapor IO is a fairly promising young company, whose main goal is to supplement the Open Data Center Runtime Environment with an intellectual level Core Operating Runtime Environment (Vapor CORE). Not so long ago, a team of specialists presented the integrated rack system of the Vapor Chamber. It embodies the new approach to the design of the next-generation data center.
Vapor Chamber
Working Conditions Vapor Chamber
A good start helped the company to complete another round of financing, during which it was possible to raise funds for the development of its business from many large and influential investors, such as the financial organization Goldman Sachs and venture capital firm AVX Partners. Representatives of Vapor IO do not yet disclose details regarding the size of the raised amount, but state that they are very pleased with the final figures.
Startup engineers Vapor IO are going to change the concept of equipment placement inside the data center using infrastructure optimization at the rack level. They propose replacing the traditional rows of mounting racks with special cylinders, each of which will combine six wedge-shaped server racks arranged in a circle. Similar designs Vapor IO suggest a significant improvement in data center.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273205/
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