Data center infrastructure in 2016: original trends that will continue in 2017

Last year, many interesting materials from the sphere of data centers, a sphere that continues to develop in the most active way, were published on Habrahabr. Not so long ago, an article was published in our blog about 2017 trends, which, according to a number of experts, will be the main ones in the new year. But do not forget about what happened in 2016 - after all, the past year has left a lot of interesting things, with which it will be necessary to deal with in the near future.

Actually, the new material can be considered a continuation of the previous one, the themes are almost identical. Here are just the trends, which were discussed above, are different. So, what did the year 2016 leave us with, what could be the development this year?

Hyper-scale data centers

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The largest and largest telecommunications companies understand that hyper-scale data centers are beneficial. Such objects greatly simplify the scaling of the computing infrastructure. This allows, in turn, to reduce such items of expenditure as maintenance and replacement of equipment that has failed for some reason. Hyper-scale data centers built for themselves many companies, the last was Linkedin. Now the number of such objects in the world already exceeds 300.

Liquid cooling for data center

The equipment in the data centers is very hot, it can not be left without cooling for a second. True, the methods and technologies of cooling, for the most part, came to us from the last century and are not too efficient (if you do not give them their due and do not develop individual cooling schemes). Recently, solutions based on liquid cooling systems have been developing more actively, when there is direct contact between the heat exchanger and the same processor. At the same time, cooling systems based on immersion in mineral oil or other liquids continue to be exclusive.

Robots and data center automation

Many operations in the data center can be automated, and productivity and labor efficiency can be enhanced by robots. This is the goal pursued by the authors of the RoboNodes project, where it is proposed to use robotic devices that will be able to independently replace the necessary equipment as it breaks down.

And for the implementation of the new scheme of work, the authors propose to abandon the usual many racks. Instead, custom systems will be used. The authors of the project go even further, saying that for successful robotization it is necessary to replace the design of the servers themselves. So far, all this is only a pilot project, and it is not known how it will develop further, but the concept is quite interesting, there are quite a lot of sound thoughts here.

Stand again

The previous paragraph stated that the standard racks were proposed to be abandoned due to the fact that the data centers of the future will be served by robots. But even if you leave the work scheme and the design of the data center the same, then the appearance of the racks can be replaced. This idea was filed by the company Vapor IO.

According to the authors of the project, wedge-shaped racks should be used in the data center, from which it is possible to form modular solutions. Novelty, as stated by the developers has an effective cooling system and software for infrastructure management. Such a system is envisaged as a “turnkey” product - it can be assembled in any region in a relatively short time.

Vapor IO has announced its own option for managing the infrastructure of the data center and analytical systems, which includes both hardware and software. The company claims that it makes a significant contribution to the Open Compute Project by offering an Open DCRE (Data Center Runtime Environment). This is a combination of sensors, software plus control panel. The system can receive and process not only data on temperature and humidity, but also data on pressure and vibration.

Data center on the water

Nautilus Data Technologies launches its first floating data center this year. Called this data center Eli M, its capacity - up to 800 racks. According to representatives of the company that created this data center, it will be used to provide colocation services.

The developers believe that this is one of the most balanced in terms of resource consumption data centers in the world. Of course, in the middle of the ocean, he will not be able to do the work for which he was intended - for this requires connecting to the network infrastructure. But in the port of a large city, where there is all the necessary infrastructure - completely.

The positive side of the project is that for this DC there is no need to build a separate pipeline and supply water. Everything works right on the spot: the system draws water directly from the ocean or the sea and after the most rough cleaning it uses it to cool the equipment. Used water is sent to the same place where it was taken from - to the ocean or the sea. Heating will be minimal, according to experts who evaluated the project, such a DC would not damage the region's ecosystem.

In general, last year left much more trends and pilot projects of different companies than could be placed in the framework of 1-2 materials. As far as possible we will write about the most interesting trends of the past and current years.