Data Centre Magazine - December 2021

December 2021 | datacentremagazine.com

Divide and Conquer: The rise of decentralised colocation Networking: Cold storage is so hot right now Technology: Is data centre cybersecurity looking in the wrong direction?

Colocation companies Critical Environments: Keeping the data centre safe for a decade of growing demand

INTERXION: COMMITTED TO NET ZERO

Lex Coors, Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer, on sustainability strategy and 2030 goals

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The DataCentre Team EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

HARRY MENEAR EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH CREATIVE TEAM

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAH BIRLESON DUKE WEATHERILL JORDAN WOOD

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ PRODUCTION MANAGERS

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DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

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OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JACK THOMPSON JANE ARNETA

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PRODUCTION EDITOR

MARKETING MANAGER

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

JANET BRICE

MOTION DESIGNER

DAISY SLATER

MARKETING DIRECTOR

ROSS GARRIGAN PROJECT DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN

LEWIS VAUGHAN

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

STACY NORMAN CEO

GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

Algae and Hydrogen: Sustainability goes beyond power and cooling Conversations about the environmental impact of data centres focus heavily on power, somewhat on water, and spend very little time discussing what it means to build the rest of these massive structures

“The vision is that essentially, you can recycle, reuse, or biodegrade everything that you use” KARIN STRAUSS, SENIOR PRINCIPAL RESEARCH MANAGER, MICROSOFT RESEARCH TEAM

This year, major cloud and colocation providers added an estimated 20mn square feet of data centre white space worldwide, and the actual physical footprint of a facility extends well beyond that.

Even though power and cooling (specifically using water) are still the biggest sources of a data centre’s environmental impact, physically constructing these facilities is also a significant issue.

Researchers in Microsoft’s “advanced development” team are racing to make the data centre of the future sustainable enough for the hyperscale cloud provider to hit carbon negative and water positive, while simultaneously building between 50 and a hundred new sites every year.

In addition to hydrogen fueled backup generators, circuit boards made from renewable materials, and liquid cooling, they’re doing some really interesting stuff using dried algae as “a oneto-one replacement” for traditional bricks, and fungi mycelium as a way to grow structural tubes.

It’s exciting to see data centre environmental innovation move beyond PUE, and maybe one day into commercial and residential construction.

HARRY MENEAR DATACENTRE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

harry.menear@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 10 Big Picture 12 The Brief 14 Timeline:

2021 Year in Review 16 Trailblazer:

Hunter Newby 20 Five Minutes With:

Simon Michie

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Committed to NetZero Data Centres by 2030

Divide and Conquer: The Rise of Decentralised Colocation

Interxion

Data Centres

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Technology

Is Data Centre Cybersecurity Looking in the Wrong Direction?

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Networking

Cold Storage is so Hot Right Now

84

Orange Marine

HIgh Seas, HIgh Tech and HIgh Levels of Sustainability

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Digital Realty The Future of Interconnection in APAC

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Critical Environments

Keeping the Data Centre Safe for a Decade of Growing Demand

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112 Nautilus Data Technologies Naturally Cold Water Cooling for High-Performance Sustainable Data Centres

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Growing with the Demand

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BIG PICTURE

Murmansk GettyImages-1194007928

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December 2021

Computing at the Edge of the World Murmansk, Russia

It doesn’t get much closer to the edge than this. Russian carrier Rostelecom is building the first Arctic data centre at the edge of the Bering Sea, near the city of Murmansk. Freezing Arctic temperatures are expected to help the facility use free cooling all year round. datacentremagazine.com

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THE BRIEF “BASIC, LOW-LEVEL PROTECTION IS NOT SUFFICIENT TO SAFEGUARD MODERN DATA CENTRES” Mark Green

Physical Security Specialist, LMG 

BY THE NUMBERS India’s data centre industry is poised for a decade of eye-wateringly high demand.

Indian Data Centre Capacity H1, 2020 and 2025

READ MORE

“Ultimately, security must be made as dynamic as the computing you are trying to protect”

375MW H1, 2020

1,078MW 2025

Trevor Dearing

Director of Technology, EMEA , Illumio  READ MORE

“EDGE COLOCATION FACILITIES ARE THE PILLARS WHICH EXTEND THE CLOUD FURTHER - DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL” John Hall

Managing Director, Proximity Data Centres  READ MORE

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December 2021

Big data, big energy consumption?

It is essential that data centre operators put energy efficiency and sustainability at the core of their business strategy. But how can they do that in a cost-efficient way and without radically restructuring their facilities?

4D: the changing face of colocation Jack Bedell-Pearce Co-founder & CEO of 4D Data Centres, breaks down the trends set to define the colocation industry over the coming year.

The Bad Kind of Data Centre Boom Bet you I can guess the plot of the next Die Hard?

They’re making another Die Hard?

Let’s say yes for the purpose of my argument.

It’s going to be set in a hyperscale data centre.

John McLane goes on a tour to see where his tech savvy zoomer daughter works, terrorists break in, someone hacks something, explosions, etc. The word “quantum” is used with little justification and Bruce Willis strangles a Russian to death with a length of fibre optic cable.

Sounds about right. Why a data centre?

Data Centres are looking like an increasingly tempting target for activists and domestic terror cells. A group of anarchist activists (with a legitimate grievance against a new, extremely faschist-looking government database) just firebombed a data centre in Athens. A data centre in Ohio got evacuated in October thanks to a bomb scare, and there was the right wing nut job who wanted to blow up the AWS site earlier this year. So far, it’s just anarchists who’ve had any measure of success, but I reckon it’s just a matter of time before a Hans Gruber type smells an opportunity.

You’ve got a bet.

Yippee Ki-Yay, Mother-

 ALIBABA CLOUD In addition to announcing a slew of new hyperscale cloud data centres across APAC, Alibaba Cloud is bringing the heat to AWS and Huawei with a new line of “breakthrough” server chips.  VANTAGE Vantage Data Centres is getting into the African data centre market at just the right time, with a $1 billion roadmap starting with an 80 MW campus in Johannesburg - right as the decade of African cloud begins.  GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, AWS The US’ biggest hyperscalers continue to (deservedly) attract bad press for their massive water consumption throughout droughtstricken regions like Arizona, Utah, and California.  DATA CENTRE CONSTRUCTION Globally, rising construction costs, materials shortages, and supply chain woes continue to hinder efforts to build enough data centres to meet exponentially growing demand.

W I N N E R S DEC21

L O S E R S

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TIMELINE

2021 YEAR IN REVIEW

It’s been a big year for the data centre industry and us here at Data Centre Magazine.

2021 has seen massive projects completed and yet more get underway. It’s seen exciting new technological advances and bold steps towards a more sustainable future. It’s been a year of great stories, so in case you missed them, we’ve put together some of our favourites from the past 12 months.

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December 2021

IXcellerate February Data Centre Magazine kicked off 2021 with a bang, featuring Guy Willner, CEO of IXcellerate, and his bold plans for a Russian hyperscale cloud revolution.

Scala April From Sao Paulo to Columbia and Mexico, Scala is set to dominate the LATAM data centre industry, delivering a world-class platform with unimpeachable green credentials.

Ark April Easily one of the most impactful stories we covered this year, check out our in depth exploration of Ark Data Centres’ mission to create socially responsible digital infrastructure.

Liquid Stack August In a world of higher rack densities, bigger deployments, and the increasingly dire need for lower energy consumption, Joe Capes, CEO of breakout liquid cooling firm LiquidStack, gives his an in-depth and nuanced take on the role of liquid cooling in the data centre industry.

DCs For Bees August True change lies in the power of the collective. No one knows this better than Garry Connolly, President and Founder of Host in Ireland, who has led the charge to mobilise Ireland’s data centre industry to help save the country’s ailing pollinator populations.

Schneider Electric August Schneider Electric has been quietly but determinedly embracing sustainability for the last 20 years and its efforts were recognised when it was awarded the prestigious title of ‘The World’s Most Sustainable Company’ by Canadian media and research company Corporate Knights in January 2021. Natalya Makarochkina, Senior Vice President of Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Division and International Operations, gives an in-depth interview as to why that’s the case.

Infrastructure Masons October The global skills shortage is biting harder than ever as the data centre industry grapples with ever-growing demand. A panel of experts from industry association Infrastructure Masons shares their insights into bridging the skills gap over the decade to come.

Iron Mountain October The Indian data centre sector surpassed all expectations this year. At the outset of their multi-million dollar joint venture, we sat down with Nikhil Rathi of Web Werks and Michael Goh of Iron Mountain to get an insider perspective on the world’s fastest growing market. datacentremagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

Hunter Newby At the Forefront of the Digital Infrastructure Revolution

2022

promises to be a transformational year for the global interconnection landscape as networks continue to embrace 5G and new technologies drive the adoption of new applications throughout the consumer and enterprise sectors.

Hunter Newby, co-founder of Netrality Data Centers, founder of Allied Fiber, and co-founder of groundbreaking enterprise communications business Telx, has spent more than 20 years at the leading edge of just about every corner of the communications space.

At Telx, he pioneered the “carrierneutral Meet-Me-Room” and was a leading figure in the development of the US’ colocation industry. Since Telx sold to Digital Realty for $1.9 billion in 2015, Newby has continued to have a hand in groundbreaking digital infrastructure investment at just about every point in the industry - often several years ahead of the curve.

Now, the industry is starting to catch up to Newby’s vision. “The Neutral Submarine Cable Landing Station

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December 2021

Amount donated to charity

$1m

(CLS) has come of age. It’s not ‘new’ per se, but it has become more mainstream. This will help open up many countries around the world and enable them to fully deregulate at the physical layer, which is how real, lasting change occurs,” he explains, adding that neutral CLS will be a pivotal step in the physical diversification of mature markets like the US, “with additional points where subsea meets terrestrial fiber systems. These also become natural, local network interconnection facilities which can drive down latencies and costs in previously remote locations.”

Newby Ventures - Hunter’s multibillion dollar digital infrastructure investment firm - has been “actively engaged in this emerging space for years” through its subsidiaries like Fibre Centre and NJFX. The fact the market is catching up to Newby Ventures’ early stage investment, however, “has created more investment opportunities for us to look at participating in.”

Throughout his 20+ years at the leading edge of digital infrastructure investment, Hunter characterises his approach to the market as “transformational,” always searching for ways to drive “value creation through problem solving at scale.”

Newby Ventures’ competitive advantage, he reflects, lies “in the combination of experience, vision, early-stage investment and active engagement for collective success.”

Looking ahead, Hunter explains that “2022 will be a transformational year

for the world in many respects.” In terms of Newby Ventures’ plans for the future, he adds that “we are very excited about our blockchain investment, SUKU and its NFT Marketplace subsidiary, Infinite, as well as our 3D CGI investment, DreamView.” These businesses will work together as the decade progresses to “form a new category in the digital infrastructure landscape leveraging much of the global network infrastructure that Newby Ventures has been a part of building and investing in for many years.”

The future may be here, but Hunter Newby already has his eyes fixed firmly on the horizon. datacentremagazine.com

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

SIMON MICHIE

Q. HOW IS THE EDGE LANDSCAPE IN THE UK CHANGING AT THE MOMENT?

» Appetite for edge computing

WE CATCH UP WITH SIMON MITCHIE, CTO OF UK HYBRID CLOUD AND COLOCATION FIRM PULSANT, TO GET A GLIMPSE INTO WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR THE UK’S DATA CENTRES AND THE EDGE.

is growing across the UK, driven by a combination of increased 5G adoption, rapid uptake in IoT solutions and number of devices in the workplace, and a surge in demand for hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

Covid-19 also forced the hand of many businesses. The dramatic shift towards dispersed and hybrid working is also probably the most immediate use case for edge computing at present.

The ever-increasing demand on networks has risen substantially since early 2020 when the pandemic struck. To maintain the same levels of efficiency and productivity in a central office environment, organisations will need points of presence in regional data centres, close to their dispersed users.

Q. WHAT'S THE MAIN CHALLENGE THAT ENTERPRISES WORKING IN THE EDGE SPACE IN THE UK ARE EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW?

» The main challenge is that many

“AT PULSANT, WE’RE MAKING A CLEAR COMMITMENT TO BRING EDGE COMPUTING TO EVERY BUSINESS, IN EVERY REGION OF THE UK” 20

December 2021

enterprises simply don’t have a good understanding of how edge computing works or how to access it. Just like the rise of cloud and managed services ten years ago, edge computing is still a fairly new technology and can mean different things to different people.

Q. COULD YOU ELABORATE ON HOW PULSANT IS DELIVERING EDGE OPPORTUNITIES TO REGIONAL ENTERPRISE-LEVEL BUSINESSES?

“ THE EVER-INCREASING DEMAND ON NETWORKS HAS RISEN SUBSTANTIALLY SINCE EARLY 2020 WHEN THE PANDEMIC STRUCK”

» At Pulsant, we’re making a

clear commitment to bring edge computing to every business, in every region of the UK. We’re doing this through the creation of a UK edge computing platform which brings together our core data centre, network and cloud services in a single and easily accessible platform for enterprises.

“We’ve invested £8 million in a new high capacity, low latency, agile national network, which will see our network of 10 regional edge data centres connected via Zayo’s high-performance fibre network.

This will deliver sub 5 millisecond latency to over 95% of the UK population and provide the access and infrastructure businesses need to adopt and deploy distributed multi-cloud and edge strategies, regardless of location.

“For regional enterprise-level businesses, the platform will be a game-changer, enabling access to a unified network with reach across all corners of the UK, connecting users and cloud-based services. datacentremagazine.com Magazine.com

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COMMIT TED TO NET -ZERO DATA CENTRES BY 2030

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December 2021

INTERXION

WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN datacentremagazine.com

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INTERXION

Lex Coors, Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer discusses the company's commitment to its sustainability strategy

A

s the interconnection hub for the world’s leading businesses, Interxion provides its clients with sustainable data centres and the right connectivity to interconnect, transact and grow businesses. The company has more than 700 connectivity providers in over 290 data centres across more than 24 countries.

With its significant global footprint, Interxion’s clients can expand their reach geographically. This is because the company’s services provide clients with the proximity needed for latency-sensitive applications, and offers interconnection on a global scale.

Founded in 1998, the company has changed massively over the years and has had to adapt to the changing technological landscape. Lex Coors, Interxion’s Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer and Visiting Professor at the University of East London, has been with the company since its infancy in 1999.

Having witnessed first-hand the immense evolution of Interxion, Coors explained how it has changed over the years, he said: “Interxion started by working in minute trading. We then moved into data centres, where we collected as many carriers together with the internet exchanges, creating the first communities of interest with enterprise customers. Then when cloud technologies came, we incorporated those into our operations too.”

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December 2021

INTERXION

Interxion ZUR3 data centre

Example of an image caption datacentremagazine.com businesschief.com

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Emergency Power

Hybrid energy

zwarttechniek.com

Service

When it matters most.

In an increasingly connected world, where datacenters have become an integral part of society’s critical infrastructure, a stable, secure power supply is more important than ever.

Zwart designs, builds and maintains emergency power installations for the world’s most demanding datacenter owners and operators.

Together with it’s engine partner Mitsubishi, Zwart’s installations ensure a trusted back-up solution for our customers throughout Europe and Africa “When it Matters Most”. Over 90 years of experience are applied every day to ensure the highest standards in all aspects of project design, delivery and service.

The Mitsubishi engines are recognised for their reliability and cost-effective operation and are ideally suited for mission critical applications. With over 100 gensets currently installed across multiple Interxion sites throughout Europe and Africa, Interxion can ensure that it delivers the highest levels of availability and uptime to its customers.

As part of a shared commitment to delivering greener solutions, Mitsubishi and Zwart have recently announced that their datacenter emergency power installations can be operated with 100%HVO diesel,

a non-fossil fuel based alternative that reduces CO2 by up to 90%.

Furthermore, Zwart and Mitsubishi are working closely with Professor Lex Coors from Interxion on his vision to the “Road to Zero”, an ambitious and challenging project to eliminate all emissions during non-emergency use by applying innovative maintenance and testing programs and developing custom equipment to ensure the high reliability reputation of Zwart’s solutions is maintained.

Jim Craig, Managing Director of Zwart said, “Only by working together can we deliver on the ambitious targets for climate neutral datacenters in 2030” Lex Coors, Chief Datacenter Technology and Engineering Officer at Interxion, a Digital Realty Company stated “As a board member of the EU Climate Neutral Datacenter Pact I am committed to driving the Road to Zero and I am encouraged by the progress being made by Zwart and Mitsubishi in this respect”

Learn more

BD

info@zwarttechniek.com

INTERXION

LEX COORS

EXECUTIVE BIO

TITLE: CHIEF DATA CENTRE TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER

Datasector over the last 10 years by Broadgroup

LOCATION: NETHERLANDS

( 2010 ), and again by DCD (2016) .

Since 2019, Lex is working with the University

Over the past 25 years of his career, he

of East London to investigate the issues around

has built exceptionally strong credentials

sustainability for Datacentres and was recently

in the design of versatile, cost-effective and energy-efficient data centre infrastructure.

During his time with Interxion he has pioneered

appointed as Visiting Professor.

At the EUDCA Lex is the Chair for the EUDCA Policy Committee where he represents the

several new approaches to data centre design

interest of the European Commercial Data

and management, including the improvement

Centre Operator Community both politically and

of power ratio efficiency between server load

commercially. Further Lex is Board Member of the

and transformer load, and the industry’s first ever

European Climate neutral datacentre pact. Lex

modular approach to data centre architecture.

is member of the iMasons Advisory Council. He

Lex received already two times the Personal Judges Award for Outstanding Contribution to the

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December 2021

studied Mechanical Engineering and Management and Economics in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

INTERXION

Committed to Net Zero data centres by 2030

Now Interxion can provide its customers with a hybrid cloud solution. These cloud technologies have also become increasingly significant with the emergence of the global remote workforce, who are more reliant on the cloud to access information remotely.

The push towards these technologies is increasing as more companies utilise cloud software services to secure and back up their IT infrastructure.

“We’ve changed significantly over the years. Now we embrace a lot of digital technologies to support our operations and have incorporated them into our platforms.

We deal with medium-sized data and once we collect this data, the company and our algorithms can learn from that to help us optimise our operations. Technology has definitely changed the way we measure data, as the algorithms now do it for us,” Coors added.

This evolution lends itself to Interxion’s commitment to its customers. The company

“ We have changed significantly over the years and now we embrace a lot of digital technologies to support our operations” LEX COORS

CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION

has needed to adapt as its customers’ needs have changed, as Coors explained: “We have a lot of enterprise customers who require the efficiencies of the colocation services we offer. With the introduction of cloud technologies, we now work together with the large cloud players and some of their most critical applications are in our data centres.

This is because we represent the core of all the networks coming together.” datacentremagazine.com

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WE BELIEVE THAT IT’S EVERYONE’S DUTY TO IMPROVE THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET

This year, Mercury launched Our Planet, Our Duty, our plan for Responsible Business. Our Planet, Our Duty is our promise to help create a more sustainable environment around us.

For more information please visit:

www.mercuryeng.com

INTERXION

Interxion PAR8 data centre

“ We have been able to say that for a few years 100% of our data centres are running on sustainable energy” LEX COORS

CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION

Adding to this, the Chief Data Centre Technology and Development Officer explained that as Interxion’s customers have grown and expanded, so has the number of data centres the company has to offer.

Building sustainable data centres for the future The data centre provider is committed to its sustainability targets and in his role, Coors works to ensure that all of Interxion’s colocation services have a minimal impact on the environment.

Explaining why sustainability is so important to the company, Coors said it is so important, he regards it “as a social corporate responsibility.”

To highlight how the company is supporting the global efforts to fight climate change, Coors outlined the work Interxion has been doing to reduce its carbon emission: “We started looking into our sustainability strategy over seven years ago. Initially, we started looking at energy efficiency in 2009 and even before that, we called it our energy overhead. Now, we have been able to say that for a few years, 100% of our data centres are running on sustainable energy.”

Interxion has pioneered energy-saving designs within its data centres to ensure they run on sustainable energy. The company has harnessed everything from arctic winds, underground aquifers and even the Baltic Sea in order to reduce its carbon footprint.

Working with big players in the technology scene has been crucial in supporting datacentremagazine.com

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Interxion Amsterdam Data Tower

700

connectivity providers in over

290

data centres across

13

European countries

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December 2021

INTERXION

Interxion, as it looked to add a sustainability focus to its operations. Coors explained that, despite Trump’s dismissal of sustainability initiatives in the United States, big customers such as Microsoft, AWS, Google and Facebook still maintained their commitment to their own sustainable targets. As a result, these big clients still expected Interxion to provide energy-efficient data centres.

Interxion’s own sustainable ambitions Although Interxion is keen to support its clients’ sustainability targets by providing them with data centres run on renewable energy, the company is ambitious with its own targets. Outlining the company’s ambitions, Coors said: “Our corporate target

“We are passionate about sustainability because you cannot design a data centre well without this understanding” LEX COORS

CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION

is a 68% reduction in scope one and reducing to two emissions by 2030. Scope one is the direct emissions, such as diesel usage; and scope two is the indirect emissions.”

He continued: “I think that these targets are so ambitious because we have close to 300-plus data centres around the globe.

We’re committed to this programme and we're driving year-on-year programmes to achieve this.”

Supporting these ambitions is Interxion’s internal function, The Energy Strategy Group. This group has participants from datacentremagazine.com

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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

The transition to cleaner data centres We spoke with Schneider Electric’s SVP Secure Power Europe, Rob McKernan, to NAME SURNAME discuss JOB TITLE, how the company COMPANY NAME create a new era is helping of sustainable data centres ROB MCKERNAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER EUROPE, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

AD

Can you tell me about Schneider Electric?

Schneider Electric is the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation and the world’s most sustainable corporation in 2021 as ranked

by Corporate Knights. As a business, we enable digital transformation across several key sectors including data centres, infrastructure, and industries. We do this by integrating world-leading processes, renewable energy, and highly efficient technologies with software and services, to drive sustainability throughout the lifecycle.

What is your role and responsibilities?

As the SVP for Secure Power in Europe, my role is to empower our country leaders to support our customers within the data centre, industrial and critical IT spaces. This includes working with our customers to define their infrastructure strategy and the business outcomes they hope to achieve through

any accompanying sustainability or digital transformation initiative. From designing and specifying the technologies, to making them more efficient and reducing their carbon footprint, my role is to connect customers with our experts and empower them to transform their businesses sustainably.

Can you talk me through your company’s own sustainability initiatives?

At Schneider Electric, we have many sustainability initiatives in place. They include the Schneider Electric Sustainability Impact (SSI) – in which we aim to help customers save 800M tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025.

To-date we have helped reduce CO2 by 319 million tonnes, which is a great start.

We are committed to reaching carbon neutrality across all company sites by 2025 and are aiming to achieve net-zero operational emissions by 2030. We also aim to achieve net zero emissions throughout our entire supply chain by 2050 and have committed to using no gases or SF6 by the end of 2025.

Why do you think it is important that data centres become more sustainable?

Our industry has been working to reduce its energy consumption and lower carbon emissions for many years. One might argue that it is an exemplar to other industries.

As large consumers of energy, it has a responsibility to commit towards sustainability and to reducing its environmental impact. New data centres can be designed to be resource efficient, however, it’s paramount that we don’t forget about inefficient legacy facilities. Here, Initiating modernisation or energy efficiency programs and switching to renewables are two key steps that legacy operators can take to become more sustainable.

How is your technology supporting this transition to more climate-conscious companies?

I believe that from a technological perspective, achieving sustainability requires a combination of hardware, software, and digital services. However, it requires far more than just the technologies and any business hoping to reduce its environmental impact should carefully consider its strategy.

At Schneider Electric we’re developing solutions to help operators meet demands for sustainability and resilience. Our Galaxy VL UPS is the industry’s most compact threephase solution, is powered by lithium-ion and offers up to 99% efficiency.

We’re innovating in the design space, using prefabricated technologies to design resourceefficient facilities, and creating edge computing systems that can be deployed sustainably.

Further, our vendor-agnostic EcoStruxure™ IT DCIM software helps end-users to not only measure their energy usage but monitor their mission-critical environments from anywhere to increase the reliability of their sites. Our DCIM software delivers smart analytics with predictive capabilities alongside built-in cybersecurity analysis, physical and environmental security monitoring – a complete solution for today’s operators.

Finally, we’ve created an Energy and Sustainability services bureau, helping customers extend the lifecycle of their infrastructure and reduce their carbon

impact. We also have a business that’s dedicated to helping customers procure renewable energy.

How do new and emerging technologies support this transition to cleaner data centres?

Technologies have a key role to play in future data centres, which must be adaptive, resilient, sustainable, and efficient. However, technology is just one aspect, and a more holistic approach to design and operations is needed. At Schneider Electric, we believe the sector can address this through five steps.

First, operators must adopt sustainable practices from the outset, creating global climate strategies that are transparent and measurable. Secondly, they must maximise the use of renewables to decrease their carbon footprint. Thirdly, by establishing resource efficient designs, operators can take a more repeatable approach to deployment and drive efficiency.

Fourthly, reducing CO2 within the supply chain is crucial, and partnering with businesses that are aligned with the same ambitions can play a key role in addressing scope 3 emissions. Finally, the utilization of circular materials that can be recycled is essential to reduce landfill.

What can we expect from Schneider Electric in the future?

One area we’re particularly excited about is the development of new sustainability metrics specifically for data centre operators. For many years PUE has been a great measure of efficiency, however, the landscape is changing, and as our industry works towards net zero, it’s essential that sustainability metrics evolve to reflect this ambition.

Our mission is to be our customers’ partner for efficiency and sustainability, so we’ll continue our work to build the sustainable and resilient data centres of the future, and help the industry reduce its carbon impact.

Discover more about EcoStruxure™ IT”

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senior management and is dedicated to developing, implementing and governing the overall energy strategies; including: • Intelligent energy buying • Continually improving Interxion’s energy efficiency and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) • Establishing the value of energy as a core service to its customers.

Collaborating with strategic partners To ensure the success of reducing its ‘scope one’ emissions, Interxion looks to its partners to help provide sustainable products and services to improve its operations. With Mitsubishi, Interxion is looking at different ways to reduce the amount of diesel the company uses in its day-to-day operations.

As a significant polluter, Interxion is keen to reduce its diesel use and as a result, reduce its scope one emissions. The company continues 38

December 2021

“ Technology has definitely changed the way we measure data, as the algorithms now do it for us” LEX COORS

CHIEF DATA CENTER TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING OFFICER, INTERXION

to work hard on this with Mitsubishi and its other partners, Schneider and Mercury.

Understanding the importance of partner collaboration is crucial to ensuring the success of Interxion’s sustainable ambitions, as Coors explained: “It’s key that our partners’ sustainability targets align with our own. We have also realised that our partners can’t support our sustainability targets all by themselves, so they need the operators of the data centre to explain the issue we're trying to solve.”

INTERXION

“Our partners listen to what the problem is and then we talk about it, to see if there's a common interest, before we start working on the solution,” he added.

Interxion’s alignment with the European Commission Keen to support the global efforts against climate change, Interxion also works closely with other data centre providers and cloud providers within the Climate-Neutral Data Centre Pact. This collaborative effort between these providers came after the European Commission announced that data centres should be climate neutral by 2030.

This Pact was set up as Interxion was keen that players in the data centre industry would meet these collective goals, ensuring the targets would be drafted by those with knowledge of the industry itself. Coors himself is on the board of directors with five other key players in the European data centre industry.

Expanding on the aims of the association, Coors said: “We spoke about how to become a more sustainable industry and realised we’re all already on the road to reaching these targets set by the European Commission. We formed the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact and defined

INTERXION MEETS THE DEMANDS OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY WITH TAILORED SOLUTIONS FROM SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC Today’s data centres are fast evolving; they have become the very beating heart of the digital economy. These mission-critical environments are far more than the legacy data storage and processing facilities of the past. They are gateways to emerging new markets and digital platforms from which businesses can expand their reach to connect with every aspect of our digital lives.

Such evolutions require a combination of energy efficient technologies that support demands for both sustainability and resilience, and secure IT platforms capable of supporting an incredible amount of real time data.

To meet the needs of its customers, Interxion, a Digital Realty company, has continued to respond with greater connectivity, more redundancy and power, while continuing to align with today’s environmental and security standards. As Fabrice Coquio, president of Interxion France, notes, “Data centres are the first brick upon which we build the digital economy,” and for nearly two decades Interxion

has been laying those bricks one by one, now operating more than 100 state of the art facilities across Europe, with a commitment to offering customers a complete portfolio of flexible data centre solutions.

For more than 15 years, Interxion has enjoyed a long-standing and successful partnership with Schneider Electric to deliver innovative colocation solutions.

Schneider Electric has supported Interxion throughout the design, construction, and operational stages of its high-density data centre environments; providing flexible architectures that include energy efficient cooling solutions, resilient power protection systems such as its Galaxy UPS, PDU and switchgear, and EcoStruxure™ IT management software to deliver uptime, sustainability and efficiency for its customers, while keeping the environment in mind.

LEARN MORE IN OUR CASE STUDY, HERE.

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INTERXION

five pillars to achieve carbon neutrality.”

“The first pillar is clean energy. So by 2025, 75% of all data centres shall be running on clean energy and by 2030, 100% of them will be. Then we need to look at energy efficiency to make sure the data centres are efficient, this is pillar number two. The third pillar looks into reusing energy. We also have the circular economy as the fourth pillar and finally, we look at water usage. These five pillars form the base of the association,” he outlined.

Approved by the European Commission’s Executive Vice President Frans Timmerman, the association sets up its own regulatory framework and is run without external legislation. Embraced by Interxion, the 40

December 2021

association is a collaborative space that sets ambitious but achievable sustainable goals for data centre providers.

Including most of the continent's key players, the current signatories of the pact represent 90% of the industry in Europe.

Just this year, the pact presented its first policy paper to the European Commission following its request. The policy paper includes a comprehensive set of 19 recommendations. These recommendations cover public procurement regulations from the procurement and development of renewable energies that can be used by the cloud and data centre industry, to supporting the development of circular

water and energy management, and recycling in the ICT sector.

A signatory himself, Timmerman commented on the pact the day it was created, he said: “Citizens across Europe are using ever more technology to go about their daily lives and they want this technology to help secure a sustainable future for all.

Today’s pledge – from important parts of the data industry – constitutes a promise to society and offers a welcome first step towards achieving our common ambitions for a smart and sustainable future.”

Signatories of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact have agreed to implement measurable energy efficiency targets,

purchase 100% carbon-free energy, prioritise water conservation, reuse and repair servers, and look for ways to recycle heat. This pledge is particularly significant when considering findings from the International Energy Agency. It found that data centres consume approximately 200 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, or nearly 1% of global electricity demand, contributing to 0.3% of all global CO2 emissions.

Both Interxion and Coors, along with the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, recognise the importance of transforming the industry to reduce the damaging effects it can have on the climate. Expanding on this, Coors said: “We are passionate about sustainability because you cannot design a data centre well without this understanding. If you do not understand sustainability well, you can build a data centre, but it will not meet the targets for the future. That's why this is so important for us.”

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DIVIDE AND CONQUER:

THE RISE OF

DECENTRALISED

COLOCATION John Hall, Managing Director at Proximity Data Centres, talks about remote work, cloud migration, and the pivotal role of decentralising data centre services.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

T

he rising tide of digital transformation - further buoyed by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic - is radically reshaping the colocation landscape. In the UK, the widespread adoption of remote and hybrid working, as well as associated cloud migrations and the wholehearted embrace of digital services, is also driving the growth of a trend in the colocation space.

As more and more people work remotely, and edge computing architectures become more prevalent, colocation services are undergoing a process of decentralisation.

“Until a decade or so ago, enterprise and colocation data centres in the UK were clustered around London telecom exchanges for sheer expediency. There was no other choice due to the need for lower latencies,” explains John Hall, Managing Director at Proximity Data Centres, a UK-based digital infrastructure and colocation firm at the crest of this 42

December 2021

John Hall Managing Director Proximity Data Centres

DATA CENTRES

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DATA CENTRES

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DATA CENTRES

“ IT’S INCREASINGLY VIABLE FOR ENTERPRISES AND SERVICE PROVIDERS TO CHOOSE DATA CENTRES OUTSIDE OF LONDON” JOHN HALL

MANAGING DIRECTOR PROXIMITY DATA CENTRES

decentralisation wave. He continues that, with the development of more reliable servers, as well as the growing availability of more sophisticated remote monitoring software, falling fibre costs, and the shift towards the cloud, things were ready to change. “It’s increasingly viable for enterprises and service providers to choose data centres outside of the London/M25 latency zone, in regions where rental costs for rackspace and hosting facilities can sometimes be half as much as they are in the capital,” Hall adds.

Proximity Data Centre, Chester

18 months ago, the pandemic provided the catalyst for that change to manifest in a very real, and very necessary way.

“The continued move to cloud and edge computing architectures is now serving to disrupt the UK data centre industry on an unprecedented scale,” says Hall.

“Furthermore, the working population has grown to be more productive working from home due to the pandemic. People are moving out of expensive cities to work in semi-rural areas which in turn put more pressure on backhauling traffic to the few hyperscale data centres in the UK. With demands for reduced latency, growing network bandwidth congestion and backhaul costs, there’s a growing realisation from within the industry that strategically positioned regional colocation datacentremagazine.com

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DATA CENTRES

facilities are pivotal to the success of UK edge deployments.”

Strategically positioned regional colocation As enterprise adoption of cloud-based software solutions delivered as a service grows, Hall explains that “users, customers and modern software demand and expect increasingly fast response times.” Basically, the more elements of the digital economy rely on low-latency, high throughput infrastructure, the more mission critical it becomes. This is especially true at the cutting edge, Hall adds, where “ultra-low latency is also seen as essential in delivering future 5G and IoT enabled technologies and applications - from driverless vehicles to remote surgery and automated factories.”

Speed and low latency – along with reducing data backhaul costs – are, therefore, the core capabilities driving the evolution of the colocation industry. Unfortunately, Hall explains, “a centralised colocation or cloud model cannot achieve this, even in a relatively small country the size of the UK, due to distance-related latency.”

He elaborates: “For example, as the quality of broadband increases, with many households and small businesses connecting fibre to the premises and

What is Decentralised Colocation?

Decentralised colocation refers to an emerging trend in which enterprise servers, as well as private and hybrid clouds, are located or hosted in third party data centres spread across multiple locations rather than just one central point.

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December 2021

reaching speeds of up to 1 Gigabit, the congestion or choke point has moved to the hyperscale data centre. This means thinking regionally, moving data closer to users to minimise latency.”

While the difference between what Hall describes as a regional decentralised colocation data centre and your average run of the mill colo site initially might seem like a matter of careful and clever branding rather than any substantive distinction, Hall is adamant that they’re not one and the same.

Proximity Data Centre, Nottingham

“In terms of what sets the emerging category of regional edge colocation facilities apart from general purpose colocation, the regional edge colocation sites are purposedesigned to be the missing link between centralised clouds and users, computers, machines and devices at the network edge,” he says. “They are highly connected, including links to local internet exchanges and, crucially, located close enough to major UK conurbations to be within proximity of highly populated areas. Effectively, edge

colocation facilities are the pillars which extend the cloud further - down to the local level. By performing much of the data processing, control and management of local applications in edge colo data centres, latency can be greatly reduced and application responsiveness optimised.”

Proximity’s strategy for the UK market is, in many ways, a big bet on the continued decentralisation of the country’s coalition market - especially as factors like the pandemic and a truly hellish real estate datacentremagazine.com

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DATA CENTRES

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December 2021

“ EDGE COLOCATION FACILITIES ARE THE PILLARS WHICH EXTEND THE CLOUD FURTHER - DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL” JOHN HALL

MANAGING DIRECTOR PROXIMITY DATA CENTRES

market continue to push economic development and users farther afield of London. “We have already opened six regional colocation sites in the past year or so with at least three more going live before the end of 2021,” says Hall. Within a year and a half, Proximity’s goal is to have 20 regional edge colocation data centres within 15 miles of 95% of the UK population.

Over the past year, explains Hall, Proximity has been “very active” in the Northwest of England. The company opened two data centres - one serving Greater Manchester and the other serving Liverpool. Both are direct points of presence (PoPs) on major networks, which makes them easily accessible to enterprise customers, CDNs, cloud and mobile operator providers.

Proximity Data Centre, Rugby

A snowball rolling to the edge As the decade wears on, the lingering influence of the pandemic isn’t the only factor that Hall sees as a driver of increasingly regional, decentralised colocation growth. “In this new edge computing world, and with the move to 5G and continuing impact of IoT and AI, we will see more regional colocation data centres being repurposed to meet new demanding requirements from enterprises for lower latency and greater agility,” he predicts.

“They’ll need to rapidly provision and scale compute and storage resources exactly where they’re needed.” datacentremagazine.com

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Cold Storage is so Hot Right Now As data sets grow in size, the industry is seeing a rise in the use of “cold storage” as a cost-effective way to store vast amounts of unstructured data WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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December 2021

T

he exponential growth of data has the potential to be a pretty dire stumbling block for enterprises, government organisations, and data centre operators. The amount of data being generated around the world every day is estimated to be around 2.5 quintillion bytes (that’s 2.5 with 18 zeros on the end) roughly equivalent to 7.5 million terabytes, or 937.5 billion HD copies of Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner. That figure is increasing at an alarming rate each year, with the total data created, copied, stored, analysed, and consumed in 2025 estimated to hit 181 zettabytes. You don’t want to know how many millennia worth of Kevin Costner movies that equates to.

To complicate matters further, all that data is becoming increasingly valuable.

Go back a decade, and the vast majority of information gathered by sensors, programs, and the like was discarded. Now, data means money. The more data you have, the more you can analyse it to track and predict trends, schedule maintenance,

NETWORKING

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NETWORKING

“ Global data streams are growing around 30% annually, potentially generating 175 ZB by 2025” DAVIDE VILLA

DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EMEAI, WESTERN DIGITAL

be more efficient, train machine learning engines, and predict consumer behaviour.

“Just look at professional sports. It’s a hot-bed for next-generation technology and data at the moment. As each season passes, hours upon hours of digital content is created. From tracking player statistics and performance analytics, to video footage capturing each piece of the action in every single game, from multiple camera

angles, in stadiums across the globe.

That’s a lot of data and it all needs to be stored somewhere,” explains Davide Villa, Director of Business Development EMEAI at Western Digital, a California-based firm that manufactures hard disk drives.

The problem with figuring out where and how to store data is that the right course of action is hugely dependent on what you actually plan on doing with that data. In the world of sports, Villa explains, “in order to deliver data rich files minute by minute, while continuing to capture live action, data management teams must decide where to store each type of data, depending on how quickly and how often they need to access it.”

Storing data that needs to be accessed often and quickly on a reel of tape creates datacentremagazine.com

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that data needs to be analysed right away, storing it is essential, and that’s where cold storage comes into play.”

“ As we reach the Zettabyte Age, cold storage is a segment of storage that is only increasing in demand” DAVIDE VILLA

DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EMEAI, WESTERN DIGITAL

backlog and inefficiency; storing everything on a disk drive or flash array can eat up an eye-watering amount of electricity, regardless of whether you’re accessing that data or not.

“This isn’t just a problem for the sports industry of course. Experts estimate that global data streams are growing around 30% annually, potentially generating 175 ZB by 2025,” Villa continues. “While not all of 54

December 2021

What is Cold Storage?

Cold Storage when it comes to storing data isn’t a literal reference to temperature.

It refers instead to methods of retaining “data that is not actively in use,” Villa explains. Cold storage - depending on the medium used - can, to differing degrees, cut the cost of retaining huge sets of typically unstructured data at the expense of recovery time. The ultimate upshot is that, if you have exabyte upon exabyte of financial records, benchmarking data, compliance information, or anything else you need to hang onto for a very long time, but don’t need to use every day, cold storage can do it more efficiently and, most importantly, more cheaply.

“The more data is stored, the more it costs,” says Villa. “As we reach the Zettabyte Age, cold storage is a segment of storage that is only increasing in demand.

According to industry analysts, 60% or more of stored data can be archived or stored in cooler storage tiers until it’s needed. As the world generates and stores more archival data than ever before, cold storage is becoming the fastest growing segment in the industry. In fact, cloud providers are reinventing their architectures with accessible archives to keep pace and ensure effective management.”

Different Types of Cold Storage There are different mediums and “tiers” of cold storage, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. Villa explains that “until recently, most secondary cold storage has been contained on either tape or hard disk

NETWORKING

Saving the World One of the industries with the greatest need for long-term, ultra-cold storage solutions that don’t degrade their data is the entertainment business. In 2019, Microsoft partnered with Warner Brothers to launch Project Silica, a novel new way of storing ultra long lasting data on squares of glass the size of a drinks coaster.

“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” wrote Warner Bros CTO Vicky Colf at the time. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.”

The result is a small quartz glass square which can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetised and other environmental threats, and contains 75.6GB of data. The information stored on these squares of quartz is being hailed as a way of eliminating the process of maintaining data storage over long periods of time. “One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation. We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it,” said Brad Collar, Warner Bros senior vice president of global archives and media engineering. datacentremagazine.com

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NETWORKING

DNA Data Storage by Twist Bioscience

The Data Double Helix If you’re looking to fill the storage needs for your “coldest” data, then tape remains the strongest option. If you’re just looking for something a little cooler than hot, hard disks may be the way to go.

Still, cold storage might seem like the most sedate part of the data storage space, but there’s no lack of innovation.

Western Digital, Villa explains, is part of the DNA Data Storage Alliance - an industry group made up of Microsoft Research,

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December 2021

Illumina and others - working towards the advancement of cold storage techniques.

“Our mission is to create and promote an interoperable storage ecosystem based on manufactured DNA as a data storage medium,” continues Villa. “Due to its high density, DNA has the capacity to pack large amounts of information into a small space and can exist for thousands of years, making it an attractive medium for archival storage.”

NETWORKING

“ Tape is still the king of long term data storage” DAVID BARKER

FOUNDER & CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, 4D DATA CENTRES

drives, with hot data moving to solid-state drives.” Now, however, with archival data predicted to represent as much as 80% of all captured data worldwide by 2025, figuring out how to meet that demand, even with hyper-dense storage mediums like tape, “presents the next great storage challenge.”

Right now, though, if you ask David Barker, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at 4D Data Centres, “Tape is still the king of long term data storage, especially

if reliability of that data years down the line is your top priority and immediate access isn’t required.” We’ve written before at Data Centre Magazine about the unexpected renaissance of tape storage - driven by its low cost, high storage volume, and the ease with which you can secure it against attacks. “Tape often gets overlooked as an old technology which has been surpassed by non-volatile memory such as SSD or even “the cloud” but if you want a medium that is very data dense (you can storage a lot of data in a physically small space), relatively quick (but not instant) to retrieve data from, doesn’t require any power to maintain the data and is incredibly reliable

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“ DNA has the capacity to pack large amounts of information into a small space and can exist for thousands of years, making it an attractive medium for archival storage” DAVIDE VILLA

DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EMEAI, WESTERN DIGITAL

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December 2021

NETWORKING

in the right conditions – Then tape is your answer,” says Barker. “You can recover data from tape that is 30 or 40 years old without too much trouble. Try finding a hard drive or NAND drive that will still work after 20 years reliably; even non-volatile memory can degrade and get ‘bit rotbitrot’ after being left unpowered for a few years.”

Despite en masse migration to public cloud, Barker points out that, depending on the nature of your data, “it can be a lot more cost effective than paying Amazon or Microsoft to store your data for years and it’s a lot more reliable than the USB hard drive someone keeps under their desk.”

However, because tape has read times measured in minutes or hours, as opposed to the seconds and milliseconds when using disk or solid state drives, it’s “an option only for very cold storage,” Villa explains. “Retrieving data from tapes can take several hours, while from HDD it takes milliseconds. HDDs are evolving to next-generation disk technologies and platforms to improve both the cost of ownership and the accessibility for active archive solutions. Recent advancements in HDD technology include new data placement technologies like zoning, higher areal densities, mechanical innovations, intelligent data storage, and new materials innovations.”

Whatever the future of cold storage looks like - whether it’s data on a tape reel or a double helix - the need for archival data storage solutions, much like the amount of data being generated around the world and much unlike Kevin Costner’s career as a leading man, is only going to continue to grow.

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NRT10 Narita, Japan

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December 2021

DIGITAL REALTY

THE FUTURE OF INTERCONNECTION IN APAC

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN datacentremagazine.com

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DIGITAL REALTY

Robert Davidson of Digital Realty talks interconnection, the fabric of fabrics, ubiquitous data centre experiences, and Digital Realty’s strategy in APAC.

T

HKG11 Hong Kong

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December 2021

he global data centre industry is entering a new evolutionary phase.

Driven by a generational shift in the ways in which data centre networks are designed, mass cloud adoption, exponential data growth, a shifting regulatory landscape, and changing approaches to interconnection, the sector is poised for revolutionary change.

“What we’re seeing is a mosaic of services coalescing around the data centre in ways that haven’t happened before,” explains Robert Davidson, Director of Network Services, APAC for global data centre operator Digital Realty. “All these different points of entry are converging at the same time in a way that's allowing us to create an environment where the ecosystem surrounding the data centre is combining connectivity, data storage, application service providers, data service providers, and the interconnectivity to move all that data back and forth between locations.”

With more than 290 data centres, ranging in size from traditional colocation facilities to massive hyperscale campuses, Digital Realty is in an unparalleled position to adapt, react, capitalise on, and drive this monumental transformation throughout the digital space.

From his home in Hong Kong, Davidson sat down with us to dig deeper into Digital Realty’s strategy for success in APAC - the world’s fastest-growing data centre region.

DIGITAL REALTY

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Staggered Evolution and a Cloud Revolution From a regulatory perspective, the process of freeing up markets and reducing barriers to entry started in the US about 25 years ago when the company deregulated in a way that meant data centres were no longer the sole province of telecom operators. A decade later, Europe did the same. “Five years ago, that same process started happening in Asia,” Davidson explains. “What you're seeing now is that the tier one markets - Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia - are already open. Then you have the tier two markets like South Korea, India, and Taiwan which are starting to follow suit. There are still a number of tier three markets in Asia that haven't really opened up yet but will probably start to do so over the next few years.”

Intersecting with the deregulation of APAC’s data centre industry is a dramatic increase in cloud adoption throughout the region. It’s this entry of overseas firms (as well as diversification and growth from domestic players), twinned with widespread 64

December 2021

“ What we’re seeing is

a mosaic of services coalescing around the data centre in ways that haven’t happened before” ROBERT DAVIDSON

DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC, DIGITAL REALITY

digital transformation, that’s driving the “mosaic of services” that Davidson describes.

As a result, he explains, things are getting a lot more complicated. “If we were talking 10 years ago, we'd be talking quite generally about a ‘data centre’; now, we can't have that same simplified conversation,” he says.

Traditionally, data centres were - as Davidson

DIGITAL REALTY KIX Campus Osaka, Japan

Five Nines

explains - just ‘data centres’: enterprise colocation facilities that resided within a city’s central business district, resulting in market interconnectivity characterised by “many-tomany” connections.

Now, things are very different. “We're seeing large hyperscale campuses located maybe 40-60km outside the network core being used for data warehousing, and then smaller edge locations close to the end user.

It's a fundamental evolution in the way that data centres are architected and scaled.

People are now looking for a mixture of large hyperscale campuses, edge transit campuses, colocation edge locations, and even micro-edge facilities which people are looking to use to lower their latencies as much as possible,” says Davidson.

“Digital Realty is building out metro ring facilities. We're building out our own interconnect infrastructure to make sure that we can get in and out of our buildings with fully diverse, tier grade access to the points of presence that our customers need to be connected to.

In the US, for example, you can get a 1+1 redundant circuit and that's going to give you five nines of availability. To get the same level of availability in a place like Jakarta or India, you're probably going to need five routes because of the level of structure in those markets.

Customers don't really want 1+1 redundancy; they want five nines of availability. So, whatever we need to do in any one market to produce that result the customer wants is what we do, rather than just building to a standard that was established for a completely different market context.”

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DIGITAL REALTY

EXECUTIVE BIO ROBERT DAVIDSON TITLE: DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC LOCATION: HONG KONG Digital Realty supports the world's leading enterprises and service providers by delivering the full spectrum of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company's global data centre platform, provides customers a trusted foundation and proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture PDx™ solution methodology for scaling digital business and efficiently managing data gravity challenges. Digital Realty's global data centre footprint gives customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with 291 facilities in 47 metros across 24 countries on six continents.

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DIGITAL REALTY

“It's requiring people to think very differently about the data centre market, as well as how facilities are going to be interconnected into the greater fabric of a given market.”

This bifurcation of the data centre industry into centralised hyperscale and a rapidly expanding edge has radically changed the ways in which data centres approach interconnection. Davidson – an 18 year veteran of CenturyLink – explains that around a decade ago, he started to witness the beginnings of this fundamental change. “Some of the most profitable routes that we had in Asia from a connectivity standpoint – where we were seeing the highest yields – were those express routes linking data centre to data centre,” he recalls.

This was a far cry from the many-to-many

“ There are still a number of tier three markets in Asia that haven't really opened up yet but will probably start to do so over the next few years” ROBERT DAVIDSON

DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC, DIGITAL REALITY

interconnection which had been the norm for the preceding decades.

“Over the last five to seven years, there's been a dynamic shift where network connectivity – largely driven by hyperscale densities – has shifted towards the centralised data centre,” he says.

Partnering for Success Power, cooling, and intelligent, efficient design are all vital parts of a data centre.

However, an industry-leading PUE and hyperdense server racks mean nothing without rich interconnection with the surrounding network.

As it executes a sweeping rollout across APAC, Digital Realty is increasingly turning to interconnection specialist Ciena in order to deliver their ubiquitous, world-class customer experience, no matter the challenges posed by local interconnection infrastructure.

and I've always maintained that they're the best partner in the space from a total cost of ownership perspective,” says Davidson. “Ciena's products give you the uptime, they give you the availability; everything just works. That's very valuable, especially in a market like Asia where you can't always rely on the level of the skill of the technician you're going to get.”

“We work very closely with Ciena to ensure that, while the approach might need to vary from market to market, at the end of the day our customers aren't stuck in our data centres. I've worked extensively with Ciena for the past 20 years. They were the main provider when I was at Qwest and CenturyLink, datacentremagazine.com

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Networks are Evolving.

Are You Ready for the Change?

Get the latest on next-gen metro and edge from Ciena and truly own the edge to deliver amazing user experiences.

Learn more

Interconnecting Digital Realty’s APAC expansion John Garrett of Ciena discusses collaborating with Digital Realty on a sweeping greenfield data centre footprint expansion throughout APAC.

“If you don’t work in the service provider industry, you may not be familiar with Ciena.

But, we are probably the coolest company in our sector. We drive the bits and bytes of the Internet,” says John Garrett, Senior Director of Sales in APJ for Ciena.

Founded in 1992, Ciena is a networking systems, services, and software company that underpins critical digital infrastructure across the world, serving more than 1,700 customers in the service provider, OTT, enterprise network, and hyperscale data centre industries.

Ciena was chosen by Digital Realty as a key technology and interconnections solution provider to support the data centre leader’s sweeping expansion throughout the APAC market, balancing a strong commercial proposition that keeps Digital Realty’s costper-bit low, while still leveraging cutting edge technology to create a world class experience for their customers.

Ciena has provided the necessary optical infrastructure to connect these new facilities, starting in Singapore, where the partnership completed a deployment earlier this year.

“We then expanded out to Hong Kong, Osaka, and Tokyo Narita, which are all scheduled to come online in the next few weeks. Then, later in the year, we’ll also be helping them connect and bring online another facility in Sydney as well,” he says. “It’s been a very exciting collaboration, and we’re excited to see these sites start to come online as part of PlatformDIGITAL.” “There’s a level of safety and comfort to Digital Realty’s choice of Ciena. They know us and know that they can trust us to deliver the right solutions to meet their needs and, by extension, their customers’ needs as well,” he adds.

Looking to the future, Digital Realty’s APAC expansion is continuing at both speed and scale. “They have some significant expansion plans for Asia,” says Garrett. “Our collaboration so far has centred on data centres that they already had up and running that we interconnected, but I know that they have other builds underway in other countries.

And we’re excited about working with them on some of those future projects.”

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Digital Realty: building the digital future

Thanks to increasing deregulation, data centre operators found themselves increasingly able to capitalise on this trend. “What those data centre operators found was that they could build those express networks between core campuses themselves, offering them at discounted rates, and eating into one of the few remaining golden goose revenue streams left to the telcos on the networking side,” Davidson says. The reason for data centre operators’ dominance over telcos in the interconnection space, he continues, is because “they were able to do it a little bit better because they didn't have to view that connectivity as a revenue source, and instead could treat it as a value-add.”

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This approach isn’t ubiquitous across the data centre sector, Davidson admits, but for Digital Realty, it’s become a cornerstone of how the company grows and attracts new customers into its user base. “When you look at how Digital Realty operates, that datacentre-to-data-centre connectivity really isn't a product: it's a feature, an add-on you see being used in order to attract people into the ecosystem,” he says. “It's not something you're looking to maximise your margin on; it's something that you're looking to sell as much of as possible in order to enable people to use your site effectively.” This ultra-open approach to the interconnection infrastructure surrounding and connecting Digital Realty’s facilities is, Davidson stresses several times

DIGITAL REALTY

throughout our interview, a key differentiator for the firm. This is a particularly exciting prospect, he continues, when you consider the scale of Digital Realty’s global platform, and their ongoing plans to grow its reach in APAC. “We're taking the idea of interconnectivity as a value-added feature a step further,” he shares. “When you're a company that has more than 290 data centres globally, that can start to be a very interesting ecosystem play, especially given the fact that we're totally open and neutral.”

“People are now looking for a mixture of large hyperscale campuses, edge transit campuses, colocation edge locations, and even micro-edge facilities” ROBERT DAVIDSON

DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC, DIGITAL REALITY

New Horizons, New Markets 2021 and 2022 are going to be bumper years for Digital Realty. In APAC alone, they’re planning to bring six new data centres online in the next nine months. “We're going to be in this rapid expansion phase as we open up data centres, and we're already working on the next set of new markets now,” Davidson explains.

When it comes to breaking into a new market, Digital Realty goes where the demand is strongest, not necessarily for data centres (there are often plenty of data centres in the countries they enter) but for Digital Realty itself. “We're being driven by the customers who want us to be in these new markets because they know that with Digital Realty they're going to get the same datacentremagazine.com

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experience no matter whether they're in Jakarta or Amsterdam,” Davidson explains.

“Right now, you can go into a lot of tier two and tier three markets and buy space in a data centre. The supply exists. However, if you do that, you're going to be managing different philosophies, operational styles, and customer experiences.” Rather than manage dozens of relationships with different data centre operators operating within dozens of different regulatory frameworks with different ways of doing business and different levels of technical sophistication, “the advantage of Digital Realty is that you can choose between 290 different sites around the world and be sure that you get the same experience in just about every single one of them,” Davidson says. “They're going to have the same portal, the same command structure, the same user experience that allows you to scale as fast as possible. It's that unified, ubiquitous experience that our 20-30 key customers value from us because, for them, a data centre is just a vehicle to help them achieve their business goals; they don't want to be managing data centres.”

This demand for ubiquitous data centre experiences from a core customer base is the thing that’s driving Digital Realty’s massive expansion throughout APAC. “We're pushing to create this unified environment in as many new markets as possible. That's what's driving our strategy, whether it's in Australia, Hong Kong, India, or Japan,” Davidson explains.

Of course, creating a totally uniform, ubiquitous solution that delivers the speed and convenience of a tier one market like Northern Virginia in a country with a very different regulatory, infrastructural, and cultural landscape, like India (where Digital Realty is currently expanding through its multi-billion dollar joint venture with Brookfield Infrastructure) is no mean feat.

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SIN12, Singapore

Ubiquitous Experiences in Diverse Markets “Each market is different,” explains Davidson. “Part of what I do is put together the regulatory and business framework to ensure that, no matter how different things may look when you part the kimono, so to speak, the market feels exactly the same as any other to our customers.”

The first part of entering a new market revolves around creating the right governmental and regulatory strategy to support Digital Realty’s plans for the country. APAC’s deregulation that we mention earlier may be progressing quickly, but the region’s markets are still broken up into three tiers.

DIGITAL REALTY

“Over the last five to seven years, there's been a dynamic shift where network connectivity has shifted towards the centralised data centre” ROBERT DAVIDSON

DIRECTOR OF NETWORK SERVICES APAC, DIGITAL REALITY

There are four tier one markets – Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia – which, Davidson explains, “are fairly open. You can build, operate, and own everything from facilities to networks and interconnection infrastructure; you're a facilities-based operator.” Then, in the tier two markets like South Korea, an operator has to approach things on more of a service basis. “You can do most things but you can't always own it all, which means you need to make some concessions or work with a partner,” Davidson says. “And then the third category is pretty much a closed market where you really can't do much of anything without a local partner, like Vietnam.”

“Digital Realty is already in all the type one markets. We're in Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.

What we need to be able to do when we look at entering a type two or type three market is figure out how we can create an environment where, while we may not be in a type one market, we can make it look like a type one market to our customers,” and the approach to each new market is different. “What we did in Seoul is very different to what we're doing in India today, and is very different to what we're going to have to do when we start considering a move into say the Philippines,” Davidson explains.

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IS DATA CENTRE

CYBERSECURITY LOOKING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION? The majority of data centre cybersecurity is externally focused. More and more, cybersecurity teams need to look within WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

S

parked by a rise in cyber attacks during the pandemic, the en masse adoption of remote work, and an increasingly unanimous migration towards the public cloud, the data centre security industry is in a state of flux. And the industry’s willingness to invest in digitally securing data centres has only risen with their perceived importance over the past 18 months.

“Society’s reliance on technology highlights the dependence both people and organisations have on the data centre industry,” says Shawn Burke, Global Chief Security Officer at Sungard Availability Services. “Online services, for both personal and professional use, have become as important as major public services. It’s rare that a week goes by without a major cyber-attack hitting the headlines, and due to the level of reliance we have on the data centre industry, it makes it an attractive target for hackers.”

In response, the global industrial cyber security market, which includes network

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“Society’s reliance on technology highlights the dependence both people and organisations have on the data centre industry” SHAWN BURKE

GLOBAL CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, SUNGARD AVAILABILITY SERVICES

security, industrial control systems (ICS), hardware- and software solutions, is expected to grow to as much as $24.41 billion for the period between 2017 and 2023 - an estimation made before the pandemic threw everything into overdrive.

Still, some experts believe that it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at a problem if you go about solving that problem in an ineffectual way. “If you look at the challenges of securing data centres and cloud computing, the focus and investments

appear completely out of sync,” remarks Trevor Dearing, EMEA Director of Technology at Illumio, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm specialising in zero trust segmentation.

According to Dearing, despite the fact that “almost 80% of the computing traffic never actually leaves the data centre, the bulk of attention is placed on protecting the 20% that does.”

Now, there’s no disputing that external data is potentially exposed to a greater level of threat, may arrive from an unknown source, and most importantly exists outside the control and visibility of the security operator - which makes it a high source of risk nonetheless. But guarding your country’s borders against axe wielding psychopaths (or, say, people infected with COVID-19) and just assuming that there aren’t any datacentremagazine.com

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Preventing Lateral Movement with Micro-Segmentation

“If you look at the challenges of securing data centres, the focus and investments appear completely out of sync” TREVOR DEARING

EMEA DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY ILLUMIO

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axe murderers already living inside those borders is, Dearing suggests, a recipe for complications. “It’s leaving the inside of the data centre unattended,” he says.

A Perspective Shift “There needs to be a shift in focus from protecting the infrastructure to preserving the data in the data centre,” Dearing continues. To execute this shift, Dearing explains that there needs to be a fundamental reassessment of how security is conceived and implemented in the data centre. He adds that it is “vital

Segmentation as-asecurity-service

to create visibility” of everything behind a facility’s firewall, something that “the sheer size, complexity, and dynamic nature of computing” makes for a fearsome challenge. As a result, Dearing explains, data centres often contain “significant resources that go undocumented.”

As a result, adds Burke, it’s more apparent than ever that “cyber security teams need to pivot quickly, adopting advanced technologies to restrict access and keep control of the data centre.” He notes that, while adoption of sophisticated security technology like biometric identification is

Illumio’s cybersecurity services rely heavily on an emerging technique that’s gaining some serious traction in the industry, as “the past few years have seen a major shift in security strategies from looking outward for external threats to detecting and defending against adversaries that have already breached the network,” Dearing explains. One of the biggest threats operators face is that “a threat actor, having found a landing point, can gradually move laterally through the network, and escalate their access and privilege while staying under the radar.” As a result, attackers with a single set of login credentials can “start an attack that may result in massive data theft or malware infection.” Network micro-segmentation plays a central role in the realisation of Zero Trust strategies by severely limiting the lateral movement of an attacker and obstructing their ability to navigate the data centre network. By dividing up environments within the network separating customer data from backup power systems and DCIM platforms, for example - “effectively shrinks the attack surface available to adversaries and provides granular control of data centre environments, down to being able to segregate individual workloads,” Dearing adds. “ The more difficult it is for the threat actor to move around, the longer they will need to dwell in the data centre network before reaching their goal, ultimately increasing the likelihood of detection by the security team who can intervene before more damage is done.”

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spreading rapidly throughout the industry, this often feels more like an attempt by operators “to assure their customers data is being kept in a highly secure environment,” rather than an entirely outcome-driven approach. “Should the worst happen, whether that be a cyber-attack, natural disaster, or fire, having backups stored in a different location will ensure the organisation can recover quickly, avoiding long-term downtime and service outages, and can continue working, even if it is in a limited capacity, until the recovery effort is complete,” Burke explains.

Spreading your assets across a number of disaster recovery sites isn’t a catchall solution, however. “Ultimately, security must be made as dynamic as the computing you are trying to protect,” says Dearing, “with security systems that evolve to mirror innovation and recalibrate with changes or attacks. Combined, these strategies, alongside employing segmentation as a security solution, will reduce the attack surface of data centres and cloud computing.”

More Data to Protect “Regardless of industry, organisations are - on average - managing 10 times more data than they did five years ago - from 1.45 petabytes in 2016 to 14.6 petabytes in 2021,” says Elizabeth Green, a cybersecurity and resilience specialist at Dell Technologies. She adds that a recent Dell Technologies report found that 82% of respondents were of the mind that their existing data protection strategies wouldn’t be enough to safeguard them against the changing threat landscape. “More than a third of organisations worldwide have experienced a ransomware attack or breach that blocked access to systems or data in 80

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the previous 12 months,” says Green. “It’s clear that improving organisational cyber security is of paramount importance.”

So, organisational, application, and infrastructural cybersecurity all need to be improved to keep data centres safe. How to do this exactly (somewhat predictably in such an ever-changing field) differs depending on who you ask.

Zero Trust and Microsegmentation If you ask Dearing, we need to shake up the ways in which we actually make data centres and the hardware that goes inside them. “It is more effective to build

TECHNOLOGY

security into the application development cycle instead of applying security to infrastructure after the applications are built, which leaves a frequently porous environment,” he explains, adding that once visibility is established, deeply embedded microsegmentation, built to follow Zero Trust protocols, will go a long way towards reducing the attack surface inside the data centre.

“Data centre providers must work across multiple locations, like we all are doing, to ensure data stays secure and business can continue as usual,” says Burke, an advocate of enterprises and their security teams

“Regardless of industry, organisations are - on average - managing 10 times more data than they did five years ago” ELIZABETH GREEN

CYBERSECURITY & RESILIENCE SPECIALIST DELL TECHNOLOGIES datacentremagazine.com

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Public vs Private Cloud Security I“Recent high-profile ransomware attacks have encouraged a debate about whether public cloud is more or less secure than private or on-premises infrastructure. My view is that public cloud is no more or less secure than on-premises solutions.

Security is predominantly about people and people on both sides can make mistakes and compromise security. ” Elizabeth Green, Cybersecurity and Resilience Specialist at Dell Technologies

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TECHNOLOGY

“It’s clear that improving organisational cyber security is of paramount importance” ELIZABETH GREEN

CYBERSECURITY & RESILIENCE SPECIALIST DELL TECHNOLOGIES

subscribing to the multiple eggs, multiple baskets approach.

Green, looking at the ongoing debate between the public and private cloud, advocates for a hybrid solution, where data is stored either on or off premises (or both) depending on the need to keep it safe - in addition to the other factors that can affect that decision. “If organisations are overly reliant and have critical data shared in the public cloud over which they have no control of recovery, they’ll be in a difficult position to answer regulatory, internal and customer questions about what happens next,” she explains. “For this reason, I recommend organisations build a hybrid cloud IT environment. This approach does not exclude anyone from taking advantage of the myriad benefits of public cloud but it does mean that critical operational and customer/user data can be held on infrastructure over which the individual organisation has control.”

In the end, however, it’s likely that a combination of all three approaches (not to mention the many more being touted by cybersecurity professionals throughout the industry) working in concert will still face tough challenges on the road ahead.

Data will continue to grow, data centres will continue to become larger and more mission critical, and we need to do everything in our power to stay ahead of a decade of rapidly evolving threats. datacentremagazine.com

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HIGH SEAS,HIGH TECH AND HIGH LEVELS OF SUSTAINABILITY WRITTEN BY: JOHN PINCHING

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PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

ORANGE MARINE

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Orange Marine uses a fleet of sophisticated ships to install global cable networks, galvanise the future of communications and uphold sustainability as it navigates the ocean.

I

n the modern world, making a video call is becoming second nature.

But how often do we consider how ‘the magic’ actually happens – how someone in a kitchen in North London can see, and talk to, someone in a Brisbane basement? The truth is – we don’t (generally speaking).

Many would guess that it’s something ‘in the air’. In truth, almost every call, WhatsApp message and video conference relies on submarine cable installed by Orange Marine. To put it into context, this is manmade cable, laid at the very bottom of the seabed; a very real, tactile operation carried out by a crew of men and women navigating

the high seas. Amid the digitisation of our world it is a refreshing reminder that ‘actual’ things are still happening!

Didier Dillard, Orange Marine’s CEO, is a veteran of submarine telecommunications and has been in the industry – fulfilling various other roles – for several decades.

“It is important to note that, materially, submarine cable doesn't have a significant environmental footprint”

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DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

ORANGE MARINE

Consequently, the sea is in his blood and the installation of cable has become a way of life – a way of life that has been significantly altered by the era of sustainability and the myriad responsibilities that come with it. Especially in an all-encompassing international cable laying operation.

“Firstly, it is important to note that, materially, submarine cable doesn't actually have a significant environmental footprint,” reflects Didier. “These cables are designed to last at least 25 years. They are robust, efficient, don't melt and, at the end of their operational usage, we can easily recover them. So, the cable by itself is already environmentally friendly.”

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ORANGE MARINE

DIDIER DILLARD TITLE: CEO COMPANY: ORANGE MARINE INDUSTRY: CABLE INSTALLATION & REPAIR

“ These cables are designed to last at least 25 years.

They are robust, efficient, don't melt and, at the end of their operational usage, we can easily recover them. So, the cable by itself is already environmentally friendly” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

EXECUTIVE BIO

Creating a global network Although cables have impressive longevity, cable installation and cable repairs need vessels and these impressive nautical creations require fuel – for the time being, it’s an occupational reality. At Orange Marine, however, the company has a strategy to make the running of its fleet as sustainable as humanly possible.

Didier says: “We have made sure that we use low-sulphur fuel, while also

Didier Dillard is an experienced executive in the telecom industry, who spent most of his career within the Orange group, formerly known as France Telecom and several years in the wholesale team of the American operator Sprint. He started his career in France Telecom submarine cable division moving from project manager for new systems, engineer in charge of installation projects onboard cable ships and finally director of marine operations.

He held then several management positions in marketing, commercial and regulatory affairs in New York, Kansas City and Paris.

He was appointed President of FT Marine SAS (commercial name : Orange Marine) and President of Elettra Tlc on January 2018. Orange Marine and Elettra are subsidiaries of the Orange group dedicated to installation and maintenance of submarine cables through their own fleet of cable ships.

Didier Dillard graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), he holds a MS in Telecommunications Engineering and a MBA from Columbia University (New York).

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“ We strive to be at the forefront of all regulation in relation to waste waters and oils. Ultimately, we always need to have the best equipment – that's something we are constantly aspiring to” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

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incorporating hybrid engines, which means our fuel is used only to produce electricity.

We try to optimise the exact number of engines that are necessary at any given point.

In terms of sustainability, we strive to be at the forefront of all regulation in relation to waste waters and oils. Ultimately, we always need to have the best equipment – that's something we are constantly aspiring to.”

Orange Marines fleet of cable ships are specifically produced to do the job of installing or repairing submarine cables.

They are uniquely robust vessels capable of navigating oceans throughout the world, even in the most adverse weather conditions. The shorter maintenance vessels are constantly on call, ready to intervene in case of cable breakage, while the longer,

ORANGE MARINE

highly sophisticated installation vessels are between 100 metres and 140 metres long.

“To give an example,” enthuses Didier.

“Our ‘René Descartes’ installation vessel is capable of laying a huge network of cable in one load. It means that it can carry upto 8,000 kilometres of cable onboard in a single operation. This vessel is currently in the middle of the Pacific, laying another transpacific cable.”

The mighty installation vessels also uphold efficiency by towing sea ploughs. This is the powerful equipment that is used to meticulously bury the cable in the often rock-hard seabed.

It is a difficult job which is undertaken methodically and, if necessary, trenches are dug to depths of two or three metres in order to accommodate the cable.

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Colombo Dockyard PLC “An odyssey of Excellence” Colombo Dockyard PLC (CDPLC) established its operations in 1974 and at present operates as Sri Lanka’s largest engineering facility leading in the business of ship repairs, shipbuilding, heavy engineering and offshore engineering operating in joint collaboration with Onomichi Dockyard Company Ltd of Japan.

Since 1974 CDPLC has been setting the standard in modern shipbuilding.

Its formative years were spent building the company’s reputation by serving the local requirements and the needs of neighbouring countries such as Maldives and Myanmar.

CDPLC subsequently became a force in the country’s shipbuilding industry and in 1993 the company formed a collaboration with the Onomichi Dockyard Company of Japan. Chairman, Hideaki Tanaka, explains: “The partnership enabled us to emerge as the most reliable, flexible, truly world-class shipbuilder in South Asia, capable of offering Japanese quality at a competitive South Asian price.”

As the era of climate change emerged the company formed a strategy to build more complex vessels such as cable layers and eco-friendly vessels using hybrid technology (which can be classified as ‘green ships’), especially targeting the European market.

D. V. Abeysinghe, the company’s Managing Director/CEO, reflects: “The challenges of the last decade have resulted in a much greater emphasis on employee skills, engineering knowledge, design management capabilities and internal quality management systems, together with safety and environment compliance.”

Ship shape

The current landmark project with Orange Marine has witnessed the company venture once again into the cable-laying market and

will see it produce this cable ship specially designed for the maintenance of both fiber optic telecommunication and inter-array power cables used in wind farms.

With the delivery of the Orange Marine vessel, CDPLC will be a leading yard in the world having delivered two sophisticated cable laying/ repair vessels within a short span of five years.

Over the last few decades the company has also been dynamically future-proofing by continuously transferring technical and practical knowledge to the younger generation. Mr Tanaka says: “We are very optimistic about the years ahead as we target the European market.”

We have the edge over other far eastern shipyards as we are in close proximity to the European market and are well experienced in transforming European ship designs in to a reality through our master craftmanship.

It certainly is a great time for CDPLC as it ambitiously navigates the high seas into a positive, sustainable future. As Mr Abeysinghe says: “It’s a pleasure to see the brand name ‘built by Colombo Dockyard, Sri Lanka’ sailing off to traverse the world seas.”

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1999

FCR became a 100% subsidiary of Orange Group

250+

Number of employees

230K+ km

of fibre optic submarine cables in all oceans

15%

of the world cable vessel fleet

7

Number of ships operated, including one dedicated to survey

670

Intercontinental- line repairs over the past 15 years including repairs at 6,000 meters deep

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ORANGE MARINE

“When you commission a new ship there is a full range of tests, including at sea, where you need to ensure that all the specifications are met ” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

Ships shaping a sustainable future Orange Marine is currently overseeing the most ambitious ship build in its history and many of the new features being rolled out are testament to the company’s focus on low carbon output and investment in longterm sustainability across all its operations.

“When you commission a new ship there is a full range of tests, including at sea, where you need to ensure that all the specifications are met,” Didier explains. “There are not many cable vessel builders around the world, so we have selected a shipyard with vast experience.”

The partnership with the designers has been essential to the construction of a trailblazing vessel, as Didier notes: “We spent a lot of time with the shipyard trying to find the best way to optimise fuel consumption, CO2 emissions and overall performance. The ship also requires an ability to operate everywhere in the world.”

“In order to refuel effectively and efficiently we have two locations in France – one in Brest and the other on the coast of the Mediterranean. In both cases, they are equipped with shore power, which means that the vessels get electricity directly from the bases, not from their engines,” he adds. datacentremagazine.com

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Orange Marine: High seas, high tech and high levels of sustainability

Culture shift as industry evolves Cable laying is an old industry negotiating (quite literally) a rapidly transforming world. While system, operation and hardware upgrades have been essential, there has also been a 96

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need to change mindsets in terms of climate change.

Rebooting belief systems has fundamentally transformed companies, making every individual think differently about the environment in which they work.

Didier is convinced that there has been a very positive cultural shift at Orange Marine and throughout the industry.

“There are already protected areas in the seabeds, so, when you design a route for a new cable, you need to get permission from the local authorities. We now have constraints linked to biodiversity and marine life that were not significant 20 years ago.”

ORANGE MARINE

“We recently complied with some very strict restrictions in terms of when and where we could install cable in French Guiana and French West Indies. These regulations were in place specifically to avoid turtle nesting season, and that gives you an idea of where the industry is going.”

Beyond changing policy, Orange Marine invites onboard sea mammal observers to accompany their operations, presenting them with opportunities to witness animal behaviour across the world’s oceans. The company is also involved with the ‘Argos system’, which deploys and collects

data from the sea's temperature. It is an initiative that the company is not obliged to participate in, but does demonstrate an expansive dedication to improving the environment.

“We are happy to do it whenever we can,” insists Didier. “It’s a new and

“There are not many cable vessel builders around the world, so we have selected a shipyard with vast experience” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

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“ I really like this compelling combination of new technologies and traditional onboard operations. You will always need to have seafarers capable of handling the cable, cutting it, joining it and manipulating it” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

increasingly visible dimension within our activity. At Orange Marine we are always trying to find new ideas or new things that have a positive impact on society.”

Igniting communication through cable Submarine cables form the critical network that maintain personal and professional relationships – they hold families together, while enabling the international corporate infrastructure to flourish when – 25 years ago – it wouldn’t have been possible.

“You cannot use the internet now without submarines, either for professional or personal usage. It's just impossible,” Didier points out. “And it’s physical stuff. I really like this compelling combination of new technologies and traditional onboard operations. You will always need to have seafarers capable of handling the cable, cutting it, joining it and manipulating it.”

“It is the same type of skill that would have been used more than a century before. It's not only software or artificial intelligence that holds the key to sustainability. You need to have real people,” he adds.

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ORANGE MARINE

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“It is the same type of skill that would have been used more than a century before. It's not only software or artificial intelligence that holds the key to sustainability. You need to have real people” DIDIER DILLARD

CEO, ORANGE MARINE

have become the fabric of our lives and, consequently, millions of miles of travelling have been taken out of the equation. The crisis has actually demonstrated what is possible by using remote technology.

“Most of the video meetings that have taken place globally have used submarine cable,” says Didier. “It enabled the world to continue to work, even if people stayed at home without commuting. By maintaining communications between continents; between countries and between islands, I think that we've become a pivotal part of the solution.”

In the past 18 months it has become obvious that submarine cables are a critical asset for all countries and the entire world.

Even small islands now receive their connectivity through submarine cables.

A prime example is Saint Helena – in the middle of the Atlantic – which has been connected by Orange Marine in the last couple of months.

There are several notable tech companies that also know the vital importance of submarine cables, especially when it comes to economics and rapid responses.

“Our industry has had huge investment from Google, Amazon and Facebook. It's interesting to hold discussions with these companies because they keep telling us that

they will require many more cables in the future,” says Didier.

“When you add up these big players with the wider needs of the global community and the all-encompassing appetite for telecommunications, our industry’s future is in good health.”

In many ways, Orange Marine has enabled the future to be brought forward, but it couldn’t have come to fruition without the craftsmanship and toil of human beings on the high seas. And in a world of digitisation it is satisfying to know that humanity is still taking centre stage.

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KEEPING THE DATA CENTRE SAFE FOR A DECADE OF GROWING DEMAND 102

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CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

As the importance of data centres around the world grows, keeping them safe is a complex and ever-evolving battle

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

T

he data centre landscape is changing. And it’s making security professionals nervous. Putting aside the constant and deeply thorny matter that is cyber security for a second -, ensuring the physical security of data centres is an increasingly mission critical concern.

Amid the continuing COVID-19 crisis, global digital transformation efforts, the shift to cloud, and the rise of 5G - not to mention IoT, smart cities, and the edge - the data centre industry is actually shrinking.

That might be a little misleading. In terms of investment, project size, capacity, revenues - you name it - the industry is booming.

Experts estimate that the global data centre industry, worth $59.3 billion in 2020, will be worth $143.7 billion by the end of 2027.

Colocation alone (that’s leaving out all private, hyperscale, and edge data centres) is expected to grow to $62.3 billion by the end of next year - up from $31.5 billion in 2017.

The market for data centres - buoyed by growth in data traffic and demand for digital services - is only going to grow.

It’s the number of data centres that’s shrinking.

In 2015, when large enterprises had just about cottoned on to the fact that cloud and colocation as-a-service was more cost effective than owning, operating, and maintaining an in-house facility (as well as a datacentremagazine.com

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“ Hurricanes, floods, and wildfires are on the rise all of them impacting the ability of data centres to stay online” DAVID WATKINS

SOLUTIONS DIRECTOR, VIRTUS DATA CENTRES

disaster recovery backup site some distance away) the total number of data centres worldwide was roughly estimated at around 8.55 million. Over the next two years, the industry began to grow significantly, but by the time we get to 2017, the number of data centres around the world is estimated to have fallen to just 8.4 million. From 2017 to today (during which time the colocation industry alone grew by more than 14% yearon-year) that number fell again. Today, there

are estimated to be just 7.2 million data centres operating around the world.

It’s not like data centres are an endangered species, but the condensation of the industry’s growing capacity into a shrinking number of facilities puts additional stress on the security teams tasked with keeping them safe.

More Eggs in Fewer Baskets So, we have bigger and bigger amounts of increasingly critical data being stored in fewer data centres. As a number of high profile outages over the past year alone have proven, the consequences of even a single server going offline can be devastating. And, as proven by the fire at OVH Cloud’s facility in France earlier this year, or the impact of Storm Uri on the Texas data centre industry, datacentremagazine.com

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proved pretty conclusively, ins, data centres will be “Whether it’s the physical threats to data vulnerable to a range of risks natural disasters, centres far beyond the unless they are physically terrorism or breakoccasional alt-right nut job secure,” and the physical ins, data centres with a pipe bomb - as we risks - as well as the cost of saw with AWS. a physical security breach will be vulnerable “Although the practice are rising. “Basic, low-level to a range of risks of physical security of data protection is not sufficient unless they are centres is very different to to safeguard modern data physically secure” cybersecurity methods, the centres,” Green explains, threats are the same,” says “particularly as perimeter David Watkins, Solutions breaches and compromising MARK GREEN PHYSICAL SECURITY SPECIALIST, Director for VIRTUS of the access control LMG Data Centres. credential are emerging as Mark Green, a physical the biggest physical threats security specialist working for UK tech and to these facilities today.” As Watkins and managed services firm (that also specialises Green lay out, the landscape of potential in data centres) LMG, explains that “whether threats facing data centres is as multifaceted it’s natural disasters, terrorism or breakin physical space as it is in the digital world.

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Then, on top of that, the location of the data centre also plays a key role in determining the level of risk it faces.

Watkins explains that “natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires are on the rise - all of them impacting the ability of data centres to stay online - and are physical security risks in the same way that accidents can happen and terrorists could attack critical national infrastructure.” Green, speaking from personal experience of the data centre site selection process, confirms that security and safety are typically the “highest priorities” when choosing a new data centre location. Operators looking to prevent breaches and outages need to consider everything from the site’s “proximity to high-risk areas, such as switch yards and chemical facilities;” to the “likelihood of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.” Green adds that a single point of entry is a key consideration since “open perimeters require more budget to secure and protect. And perimeter protection, done properly, tends to be more expensive than securing the actual building.”

Protecting the Nest When it comes to physically protecting a data centre, Watkins explains that “to achieve the gold standard, there should be seven layers of physical security: a physical barrier, trembler wire, surveillance cameras, 24/7 security guards, vehicle trap, full authentication & access policy control and biometrics.” The key - as with the cybersecurity side of things - is controlling who gets in and who gets out.

Another good way to minimise that threat, he adds, is not to disclose your location.

While the idea of an inconspicuous data centre might seem like trying to hide an elephant in a crowd of mice, even simple

Ringed With Fibre One new technique for keeping data centres physically secure is Distributed Acoustic Sensing technology, which “taps into fibre optics cables traditionally used for communications to provide continuous monitoring of a perimeter,” explains Stuart Large, Product Line and Business Development Director at Fotech, one of the firms driving innovation and adoption of DAS tech.

“The fibre optic cable becomes hundreds of thousands of vibration sensors that detect and track any activity, including vehicle movements, intruders climbing walls, digging or cutting fencing.

DAS works by sending thousands of pulses of light along fibre optic cables every second and monitoring the pattern of light reflected back. The fibre optic cable picks up acoustic or vibrational energy from activity around the perimeter, which changes the light pattern reflected back,” Large explains. “By using advanced algorithms and processing, DAS analyses these changes to identify and to categorise the disturbance. Each type of disturbance has its own signature; the technology tells in real-time, what’s happening, and where, raising an appropriate alarm.”

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Quick Q&A: Mark Green, LMG How does site selection change the physical threat landscape facing a data centre?

“Security and safety are typically the highest priority in data centre site selection. To prevent physical breaches, the following need to be considered: proximity to highrisk areas, such as switch yards and chemical facilities; likelihood of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes; single entry point into the facility.

It’s also worth stating that open perimeters require more budget to secure and protect.

And perimeter protection, done properly, tends to be more expensive than securing the actual building.”

Is it harder or easier to secure a massive hyperscale campus or a smaller site?

“Again, perimeter plays a big part in this. The

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larger the perimeter, the more difficult it is to secure. That said, once the perimeter is secured, breaches are reported to the data centre control room, so operationally they are not harder to manage.

Larger campus buildings inside the perimeter are just as easy to protect if entry and exit points are kept to a minimum and include a singularity test at each entry point – usually an airlock.”

What are some of the reasons that people might try to physically breach a data centre's security?

“There are many reasons why people might try to physically breach a data centre’s security features. They may have grievances against the host company and want to disrupt their services. Or, in more extreme cases, they may want to compromise the national security assets of a geopolitical rival.”

CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

“ Basic, low-level protection is not sufficient to safeguard modern data centres” MARK GREEN

PHYSICAL SECURITY SPECIALIST, LMG

steps can be effective when it comes to avoiding attention. “Most data centre operators are keen to not publicly identify their buildings with corporate logos,” says Watkins. Hyperscalers tend to take this to the extreme, treating their facilities more like government blacksites than big boxes full of IT gear - sometimes with the opposite effect than intended.

When Facebook announced back in February that it would be adding a further

900,000 square feet of floor space to its campus in Eagle Mountain, Utah, local residents came forward to complain of harassment by private security staff when driving near the Eagle Mountain campus on public roads. Local mother, Kendra Whatcott, even claimed that, “The second your car is ‘spotted’ by security there is a security vehicle who follows you, outside on the public road,” adding that she was aware of those security details pulling over citizens, something the local sheriff's department assured her was illegal (it is).

Green maintains, however, that “when it comes to data centre security, it is important to ensure that only authorised employees

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“ The fibre optic cable becomes hundreds of thousands of vibration sensors that detect and track any activity, including vehicle movements, intruders climbing walls, digging or cutting fencing” STUART LARGE

PRODUCT LINE AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, FOTECH

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and vehicles have access to the surrounding area as well as the building itself,” since the “reputational damage, regulatory fines and customer churn” that can follow a breach make them extremely costly affairs.

Some data centre operators make the effort to take physical security to the next level (and then the next one after that as well), like Iron Mountain, which operates an ultra secure data centre buried more than 200 feet under the hills of rural Pennsylvania at the bottom of a disused limestone mine, or Green Mountain, which famously operates a data centre inside a decommissioned NATO ammunition storage facility designed to ride out a nuclear apocalypse in relative comfort. Watkins admits that “These types of locations are certainly a deterrent for potential attackers,” but cautions that “we must remember that we are in the business of providing a service for our clients.

Logistically, it is far more difficult to get to and from these types of locations, making it non-viable for our customers who often work from our facilities and sometimes need to make changes to their equipment.”

Site selection, it would seem, is just one more plate for physical security teams to spin. “We choose the locations of our data centres for many reasons, such as transport infrastructure, power provision and real estate cost and availability, and physical security is always a key consideration,” says Watkins, reflecting on VIRTUS’ own portfolio.

“Furthermore, many large customers operate on a zonal topology which requires a number of facilities to be within certain distance restrictions which can limit the opportunity for this type of deployment.” So, unless you’re looking to lock away your state secrets for a very long time, bringing your data centre above the surface of the earth still seems to be worth the risk. datacentremagazine.com

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NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

NATURALLY COLD WATER COOLING FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE SUSTAINABLE DATA CENTRES datacentremagazine.com

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Using naturally cold water for cooling global data centres is sustainable, environmentally friendly, and it enables high-performance compute for a greater future use of technology

N

autilus Data Technologies prides itself on its technology that is able to cool data centres with naturally cold water, instead of using water which has been mechanically chilled. Owing to the abundance of naturally cold water in locations across the world, data centres can also be placed in a wide variety of locations globally.

Company CEO, James Connaughton explains: “Our preferred sites for data centres are brownfields because they’re perfect for large industrial watercooling systems. They also help create new jobs, as well as digital infrastructure for those communities which are left behind in terms of digital transformation. And at the same time this means we can be closely located in the environments the sector needs to serve.”

The current issue is that infrastructure needs to support hotter, faster servers and use naturally cold water to cool data centres in a more sustainable way of doing so.

Connaughton added that in order to roll this out, Nautilus works with regional and global partners on the capability to deliver these systems and empower them to work with the company to deliver these systems.

“Our goal is not to keep the technology just close to us, but help build facilities that are successful and find a way to get the entire sector to transform into a much more sustainable method of operations and engagement with the local community,” he stresses.

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Company CEO, James Connaughton

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Focus on sustainability and renewables Connaughton adds that by combining their water-cooling technology with renewable energy sources, that means zero emissions in the sector with an extra 70-80% of cooling efficiency – further driving the value of renewables.

He explains: “Unlike most conventionally chilled data centres, we consume no water, whereas mechanically-chilled systems consume a lot. Conventional systems use drinking water, which uses energy to deliver the drinking water to the data centre. Then the data centre retreats the water. In mechanical chilling, water also evaporates, and a big chunk also ends up in the wastewater system. But if you chill data centres with naturally cold water, you don’t have to do any of that.”

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“ Unlike most conventionally chilled data centres, we consume no water, whereas mechanicallychilled systems consume a lot. Conventional systems use drinking water, which uses energy to deliver the drinking water to the data centre” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

25+

Number of Staff

Connaughton adds the Nautilus approach also means the removal of refrigerants from the cooling process, which are ozonedepleting substances and states such chemicals are not needed any more. Another advantage to the Nautilus system, he says, is the removal of noise owing to not having big chilling systems running. “All of this is a huge leap forward in terms of environmental benefit,” he states.

Most notable aspects of Nautilus technology One of the reasons the company is unique in its outlook is the fact that it delivered its first data centre project on a barge. And this was because, the company wanted to demonstrate that it not only could cool with water, but that it could also prefabricate an entire data centre and deliver it to anywhere in the world – and they could locate to the water beside the shore, or on land near a water source.

“The computers don’t exactly care, do they?” jokes Connaughton. “So we can find these optimal solutions for rapid deployment into both developed countries, but also to bring digital infrastructure into emerging markets where access to digital transformation is lacking and that is very important to us,” he adds.

Scaling up the benefits Its data centres are prefabricated, as mentioned, and tested and the components

DATA CENTRE WATER CONSUMPTION

DID YOU KNOW...

2013

Year Founded

commissioned, then delivered either on floating platforms or on land. When it comes to land-based centres, Connaughton says all they need is the concrete pad. He added that meant greater density, being able to handle two to 20 times the computational power for the same footprint.

“We are able to plug in quite sizable computing capacity into very small geographies, which in turn enables us to fit into the edge, as edge computing continues to grow. And the edge is core to what we do. It means we can continue to grow these big regional and global hubs that are more remote and repurpose infrastructure in locations where there are massive exchanges and everything in between,” explained Connaughton. He added that the technology’s scalability comes with the ability to have a global supply chain, which is what Nautilus has. “We have been able to identify capable and competitive

Data centres consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% sourced from potable water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation.

Although in the USA, data centre water consumption (1.7 billion litres/ day) is small compared to total water consumption (1218 billion litres/day), there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption. nature.com

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“ It was very clear Nautilus’ holds the potential to drive an exponential leap forwards in global sustainability. It also became clear that existing data centre operations aren’t sustainable” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

supporters that can help us deliver the technology in any place on earth. For example, we can pick up the phone to a developer in Indonesia who wants to do a project and be ready to deliver the entire package in partnership with them,” he says.

The challenges and differences in land versus water-based projects Connaughton explains that currently, most mission-critical infrastructure sits at the water’s edge. He offers examples of water treatment facilities, power plants, chemical facilities and major manufacturing facilities.

However, he says, this was a new thing when it comes to data centres.

“We are the simplest plugin to those locations and can tie into, for example, any existing desalination infrastructures, drinking water treatment or wastewater treatment datacentremagazine.com

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and repurpose their water. Our data centres are still 100% the same as other data centres, the same electrical systems, same rack, same networking capabilities, and same security, so people can be comfortable that they are getting the full data centre, but with a much better cooling system,” explain Connaughton.

The promise and deliverance of sustainability In order to deliver on sustainability goals, Nautilus suggests more of the sector looks at moving to using water cooling technologies.

This is because there have been issues with water supply all over the world, whereby drinking water is being taken by data centres which is needed for people. But now that is not necessary. Connaughton thinks this transition is starting, but believes it will take two to five years to get everyone on board.

“Covid cost us a year in time to do this but we already have big global hubs and we’re seeing increasingly

“Our data centres are still 100% the same as other data centres, the same electrical systems, same rack, same networking capabilities, same security, so people can be comfortable that they are getting the full data centre, but with a much better cooling system” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

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JAMES CONNAUGHTON TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER INDUSTRY: D ATA CENTRES AND COOLING TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: FLORIDA, UNITED STATES

EXECUTIVE BIO

James Connaughton is a globally distinguished energy, environment and, technology expert, as both corporate leader and White House policymaker. Mr. Connaughton is the CEO of Nautilus Data Technologies, a high-performance, ultra-efficient, and sustainable data centre infrastructure company powered by its proprietary water-cooling system. Before joining Nautilus Data Technologies, he served as Executive Vice President of C3.ai, a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation.

energy, environment, natural resource, and climate change policies. An avid ocean conservationist, Mr. Connaughton helped establish four of the largest and most ecologically diverse marine resource conservation areas in the world.

Mr. Connaughton is a member of the Advisory Board of the ClearPath Foundation and serves as an Advisor to X (Google’s Moonshot Factory) and Shine Technologies, a medical and commercial isotope company. He is also a member of the Board of Directors at the Resources for the Future and a member of the Advisory Boards at Yale’s Center on Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia’s Global Center on Energy Policy.

From 2009-2013, Mr. Connaughton was Executive Vice President and a member of the Management Committee of Exelon and Constellation Energy, two of America’s cleanest, competitive suppliers of electricity, natural gas, and energy services. In 2001, Mr. Connaughton was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate to serve as Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He served as President George W. Bush’s senior advisor on energy, environment, and natural resources, and as Director of the White House Office of Environmental Policy. During his eight-year service, Mr. Connaughton worked closely with the President, the Cabinet, and the Congress to develop and implement

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distributed power, smart cities, smart grids and smart transportation already. So this kind of digital transformation and adoption of new technologies such as water cooling will happen very quickly once it’s taken up by everyone. I think that could be within the next ten years,” he said.

Connaughton said the tipping point for the technology’s adoption will come from the customer and compared the uptake to the surge of electric vehicle usage, as well as the rapid leap from standard call and text mobile phones to the full-on smartphones we all use today.

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started to creep in in the 1980s and into the 1990s and then after a few years, boom, smartphones were everywhere almost overnight and everyone had got rid of their perfectly functioning, what were, cell phones,” he recalls.

Partners and collaborations Nautilus lists its main partners as Schneider, Bechtel, USystems, and Vertiv and says it is establishing more global vendor relationships, plus partners for new data centres, skilling them up and training them in how to operate the systems.

Connaughton says: “We like to work with creative and innovative partners

NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

“ I am feeling confident because collectively the leadership team has in the region of 200 years’ experience so they know what they’re doing” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

who understand what we’re doing and the leap forward benefits of what we do.

We like at the moment to start with local developers and then the bigger players as they implement their own development.

We’ll see what happens in the enterprise and hyperscale world and how much our partners want to build their own offerings versus them leasing from others, but we are looking forward to them integrating what we are doing with what they are doing themselves. Currently we are having good, constructive conversations with many partners and collaborators about that.”

And Connaughton is keen to emphasise that in terms of Nautilus’ management datacentremagazine.com

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“Nautilus focuses on supporting the highest level of performance with the lowest environmental impact and the best social and economic benefit, this is the definition of sustainability” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

structure and team members, they are all made up of previous major data centre suppliers who collectively have built hundreds of data centres across the world.

“They all made the jump over to us and our data centre systems and are some of the most accomplished people in the data centre sector. Hopefully that will tell you something about what we do here and our vision for the future of this technology,” he stated.

The immediate future and planning goals Connaughton describes his business as a “very thoughtful start-up” but added that he didn’t want it to “get ahead of itself.”

He thinks the main aim right now for the business is to raise and maintain visibility, which has been the case with rolling out their first project and has prompted interest in what Nautilus does.

“So right now we are working on fitting out the first facility in Stockton, California and then working on two new locations, one in Maine in the northeast of the US and one in western Ireland, which we think are both good as global hubs for the technology as they are on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then next year we are looking at city centre locations which will have the ability to deliver large-scale infrastructure.”

He added that half of the new locations are in fully developed markets and half in leading emerging markets. “We’re being quite thoughtful of what our customer class is and at the same time geographic diversity so we can create some acceleration in the adoption of the technology. Then it’s a case of firming up the engineering packages we can offer, along with the licensing program,” he goes on: “The idea is then partners can come to us and we already have the engineering , manufacturing and vendor processes and we can provide the licensing and procurement schedules.

We want to make the whole process really easy for the data centre developers, offering a complete package.

“Having the prefabricated modular design enables business to move quickly and provides the highest level of computing, the lowest environmental footprint and the greatest social gain at the same time,” Connaughton concludes.

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THE TOP 10 DATA CENTRE COLOCATION COMPANIES From the edge to the hyperscale, Data Centre Magazine rounds up the top 10 data centre colocation companies in the world.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

I

t’s been an exciting, unprecedented, challenging year for the data centre industry. The ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the precipitous growth of remote work, exponential data generation, and the continued adoption of new, digitally transformative technologies from 5G to edge computing and AI, have all conspired to establish the data centre as the beating heart of the digital world. The industry has responded heroically, with massive new projects started to meet nigh-insurmountable demand. As cloud adoption, highdensity computing, and colocation find themselves in greater demand, here are the top 10 companies offering colocation services worldwide.

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10

Iron Mountain

HQ: Boston, Massachusettsts

CEO: William Meaney

A byword for security and data protection, document storage firm Iron Mountain has pivoted successfully into the data centre industry over the past decade. The company owns and operates 18 data centres (including a hypersecure facility built 220 feet underground in Pennsylvania) across three continents. This year, Iron Mountain expanded into the Indian data centre market with a multi-million dollar joint venture in partnership with local operator Web Werks.

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09 Colt

HQ: London, UK

CEO: Niclas Sanfridsson One of the world’s most exciting suppliers of hyperscale colocation services, Colt has a platform of 15 data centres worldwide. In Europe, the company operates six sites across London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Rotterdam. Currently, Colt is focusing on expanding its APAC operations, where it operates nine sites across India, Hong Kong, and Japan where the bulk of its footprint is concentrated. Earlier this year, Colt announced another hyperscale build - a 45+ MW site in Osaka, Japan. When complete, the company will operate almost 100 MW of data centre capacity throughout the country.

TOP 10

08

QTS Realty

HQ: Overland Park, Kansas

CEO: Chad Williams

QTS Realty’s platform of 28 colocation data centres is divided across the United States, where it operates sites in New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley, and the Netherlands, where the company has one data centre in Eemshaven and another in Groningen. QTS Realty was acquired earlier this year by US investment giant Blackstone for a lump sum of $10bn.

07

Flexential

HQ: Charlotte, North Carolina

CEO: Christopher Downie Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Flexential is a colocation, managed services and cloudhosting data centre operator with a network of almost 40 data centres spread across 20 markets.

The majority of the company’s operations are concentrated in the US, although Flexntial has been making successful inroads throughout APAC, as well as in Europe and South America. datacentremagazine.com

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TOP 10

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CyrusOne

HQ: Dallas, Texas

CEO: David Ferdman

06

KDDI/Telehouse Tokyo, Japan

President & CEO: Makoto Takahashi Owned by Japanese IT solutions firm KDDI, Telehouse’s data centre platform is active across North America but is largely focused on Europe, where the company has multiple facilities in London and Paris - as well as a direct landing station data centre in Marseille connected to the 2Africa subsea cable. In APAC, KDDI/Telehouse operates colocation data centres in established markets like China and Japan, as well as emerging hot spots like Vietnam.

Texan data centre giant CyrusOne owns and operates a sizable portfolio of more than 50 data centres throughout North America, Europe, and South America.

Although the company has largely focused on the US and Europe’s larger FLAP-D (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin) markets so far, this year, CyrusOne expanded its footprint towards more emerging markets, starting with a 21 MW facility in Madrid.

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04 Cyxtera

HQ: Coral Gables, Floridaa

CEO: Nelson Fonseca

Cyxtera’s platform of more than 60 data centre facilities extends across 29 markets worldwide, making it one of the world’s leading suppliers of retail colocation space. The company was founded in 2017 from the merger of CenturyLink and Savvis’ data centre portfolios, and is currently focused on the US market, although it does operate facilities in London, Amsterdam, Germany, China, Singapore and Australia.

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03 NTT Global Data Centres HQ: Tokyo, Japan

President: Masaaki Moribayashi Just a few years after the majority of the telco sector dropped their data centre assets like they had the plague, the data centre division of Japanese network operator NTT Communications is still cementing its place among the world’s biggest colocation providers. With a largely APAC-focused portfolio - but a respectable presence in the US following the company’s 2018 acquisition of RagingWire, as well as a sizable footprint in the UK and India - NTT GDC’s global portfolio is poised to grow even more this year.

In September, the company announced plans to expand its data centre footprint by 20% across keymarkets, including London, Singapore, Tokyo, and Virginia.

02

TOP 10

Equinix

HQ: Redwood City, California

CEO: Charles J. Meyers

With over 220 international business exchange (IBX) data centres in more than 26 countries, Equinix has one of the largest and best-connected data centre footprints of any colocation provider in the industry.

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Equinix has the market’s largest ecosystem, comprising more than 10,000 companies, and delivers a rich ecosystem experience through its hyper-interconnected network of facilities with near-peerless uptime.

The company, like many other international collocation leaders, is expanding aggressively into the Indian market, purchasing a two data centre campus in Mumbai earlier this year.

“ Equinix remains uniquely positioned as traditional technology markets continue to shift to as-aservice consumption models” datacentremagazine.com

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“ We want Digital Realty to become the recognised data centre leader across Asia Pacific” Digital Realty/Interxion HQ: San Francisco, California

CEO: Bill Stein

As the world’s leading supplier of data centre colocation services, it’s virtually impossible to overstate the reach of Digital Realty’s platform.

Along with its European subsidiary brand Interxion, Digital Realty owns and operates more than 290 data centres in 47 metros across 24 countries on six continents. In addition to a combined capacity of more than 440 MW in Europe alone, and a sweeping presence across North America, Digital Realty is also undergoing a significant expansion throughout the APAC Region. In the last year alone, the company has announced new facilities in Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong. This rapidly expanding data centre footprint is also being interconnected with dense, carrierneutral fibre links, as the company builds towards the upcoming launch of the “Fabric of Fabrics.”

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SUDLOWS

Growing with the Demand WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

SUDLOWS

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John Rippingale, Director of APAC at Sudlows Consulting

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SUDLOWS

John Rippingale, Managing Director of MEA & APAC at Sudlows Consulting, talks designing, building, and commissioning for the MEA & APAC data centre boom

T

he Asia Pacific (APAC) data centre industry is undergoing a period of unprecedented growth. Countries like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines - all of which find themselves with large, growing populations and a lack of digital infrastructure - are racing to digitalise fast.

“India's a really interesting market at the moment. There are over 1.3 billion people, and the amount of digitalisation happening there is staggering; the number of people that are getting connected, and the number of people who have yet to be connected, is significant,” says John Rippingale, MEA & APAC Managing Director for the newly re-branded and relaunched Sudlows Consulting. “Earlier this year, the total data centre capacity that was live in India was roughly 400 MW. We currently have over 330 MW at varying stages of development, from concept to detail design and commissioning. Sudlows in isolation is contributing to almost doubling the country's data centre capacity, let alone other consultants who are active in the market - who I’d imagine are dealing with a similar number of projects to us.

And that's still not enough to satisfy the demand.”

The Sudlows that people are familiar with and know in the UK and Europe is a datacentremagazine.com

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Sudlows Consulting: the top-tier data centre experts

niche design and build company working primarily in critical infrastructure that, John explains, “predominantly designs and builds data centre facilities that go up to about 10 MW of IT Load.” Just as the data centre industry has radically evolved over the past five years, Sudlows too is growing in the direction of the highest demand. Over the past few years, John explains, that demand has pulled the company inexorably in the direction of MEA and APAC. Rippingale joined the company in late 2014 to take a leading role in setting up Sudlows’ first international office in Dubai.

Roughly two years later, growing demand from Sudlows’ clients in the UK prompted the company to expand still further into India, where the number of hyperscale projects was just beginning to explode.

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further east. “After the success of our India office, the progression into the rest of APAC was quite a natural one. We were looking to expand further into central APAC, and Singapore was an obvious choice for our next office,” John explains, adding that “A lot of the organisations we work for in India have their head offices in Singapore.” While restrictions on new data centre builds remain in place throughout Singapore, Sudlows Consultings’ new office will, John continues, be a staging ground for further growth throughout Central and Southeast Asia. “We're looking beyond Singapore into some of the surrounding markets where there's absolutely massive growth in demand for digital services and infrastructure - not to mention all the hyperscalers setting up new cloud regions.”

SUDLOWS

John Rippingale

“After the success of our India office, the progression into the rest of APAC was quite a natural one”

TITLE: M ANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC John is a proficient, highly respected leader and data centre professional expert.

John has amassed a strong and detailed knowledge of the fast paced critical data centre industry. He has accumulated a wide range of leadership, technical and commercial skills gained through various roles within design, sales, management, project delivery and commissioning, this has provided John with a full lifecycle knowledge/appreciation and holistic approach to data centre design and build projects and the critical infrastructure industry as a whole.

John has successfully launched three international consulting offices, creating a specialist data centre MEP consultancy business.

Through his leadership has turned the brand into both a successful and highly sought-after critical infrastructure specialist in the middle east which has seen progressive growth doubling year on year since its launch both in headcount and revenue.

JOHN RIPPINGALE

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC, SUDLOWS CONSULTING

SUDLOWS

The Contractor’s Consultancy Sudlows Consulting is “an inch wide and a mile deep,” John explains. Outside of the UK, the company is a dedicated, full-stack, fulllifecycle consulting and professional services provider to some of the world’s biggest data centre operators - and the work they attract speaks for itself.

“Between Dubai and India, we have over 500 MW of projects, and we're working with pretty much every company in the top right of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for our industry,” says John.

One of the key reasons behind Sudlows’ success in the UAE, India, and beyond is the level of intersectional expertise and holistic understanding that it cultivates across its teams. “It's really important that our people have a holistic understanding of how all the elements of the business work. If you've 144

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got commissioning experience, it's going to make you a better designer because you understand the whole process from start to finish, not just your own little silo,” John explains. “We move people around the business and we end up with people who've been design engineers for five years telling us that they actually really like and now prefer commissioning.”

As a result, he continues, designers pick up tricks of the trade from commissioners, people working on projects have a deeper understanding of the intent behind designs - not to mention how to execute them - and the entire team ends up having a flexible, dynamic approach that translates directly into benefits for the client.

“We're known as the contractor's consultancy out here because we come from a contracting background, which

SUDLOWS

“ It's really important that our people have a holistic understanding of how all the elements of the business work” JOHN RIPPINGALE

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC, SUDLOWS CONSULTING

means we're better equipped to work with contractors, be flexible, and not just rigidly stick to our initial designs when something poses a problem,” John explains. “It's all about making the project work. And data centre projects have really aggressive timelines, because the client wants the site to go live as soon as possible - because that's when the facility can start generating revenue for them.”

By applying this approach to the full endto-end lifecycle of a data centre project, Sudlows has established itself as an extremely versatile organisation in the UAE and India.

“We can be with the client throughout the whole lifecycle of a project,” adds John. “Even if we're not the lead consultant on a project, there are still lots of different stages where we can get involved and help support the client by adding value to the project.” datacentremagazine.com

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“ Even if we're not the lead consultant on a project, there are still lots of different stages where we can get involved and help support the client” JOHN RIPPINGALE

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC, SUDLOWS CONSULTING

India: Building with the boom Nowhere is the tremendous growth that Rippingale describes more apparent than in India, where Sudlows Consulting has been active for several years now. It was in 2017, John recalls, that the Middle East operations he had spent two years working hard to build “really started to take off.”

“We got invited to more projects, started to win more bids, and forged some strong alliances with contractors and clients in the market,” he says. “Around that time, our UK office did some work with a global developer whose Indian team really liked what we did. They asked if we could come over and do some peer review work for them on a big project out there.” Rippingale took on the account, met with the company’s CEO and Indian team, and “what started off as a small peer review package turned into Sudlows doing the mechanical design, the testing, and commissioning for that project,” John says. “They said they really loved what we do, loved our experience and focus on the A-to-Z of data centres, and said they wanted to give us more work if we could make the commitment to opening an office in India.” Fast forward to the end of last year, and Sudlows was working on approximately 250 MW worth of projects 146

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SUDLOWS

as the lead consultancy with that single developer. “We're working on some of the biggest projects in India right now, which I am extremely proud of but equally aware of the gravity of what we are doing and the trust put in us by our clients,” adds John.

In the UAE - a place which John describes as “heaven for engineers” where people like him are “encouraged to dream bigger” - Sudlows Consulting’s largest data centre project has a capacity of 16 MW IT Load.

In India, he says, “we're working on 50 MW single buildings as well as campus projects with capacities of 250 MW or higher. And we're just one consultancy. There are other successful firms working in the market, there are a lot of new players moving into the market; despite all this, we just can't build sites fast enough to meet demand.”

A typical data centre project in India, John explains, is a vertical build of between 6 and 10 floors which progresses from the concept stage to fully operational in between 22 and 26 months. “At the beginning of that two-year period, the demand is already outstripping the supply.

Even if everyone decides to build to meet that present demand, by the time those projects are live two years later, the demand has already grown again,” he laughs. “The industry just can’t bring new facilities online fast enough.”

The prospect of tackling bigger projects in smaller amounts of time was one that John admits he definitely found exciting. “Land really is at a premium, so everything is being built at least eight floors tall now and we're heading for eleven floors becoming the new standard,” he explains. “It can be quite a mind-boggling thing to fit bigger and bigger, denser and denser data centres into these buildings that are getting taller and taller, all while using as little space as possible for all datacentremagazine.com

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TACKLING THE SKILLS SHORTAGE Rising above other industry pain points like COVID-19, rising materials and construction costs, and the looming spectre of the climate crisis, John Rippingale sees the industry skills shortage as the biggest challenge facing the data centre industry today. “One of the biggest struggles in the market right now is obviously the skills shortage when it comes to getting people into the MEP space, not just into data centres,” he notes. “Lots of people are going into IT, cybersecurity, fintech - all the more 'glamourous' sectors - but behind all of those industries is a data centre. There's increasing demand, but we need people who understand how to do hands-on engineering.”

The exponentially rising demand for capacity in markets like India, he adds, is only exacerbating the issue.

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So how are you solving the skills shortage at Sudlows Consulting?

I've always been a big believer in taking on graduates. Even in the early days when I was building up the business in Dubai, employing staff with vast data centre experience was beneficial and required, however, but we also made sure we were hiring people just a few years out of university who didn't necessarily have data centre experience, but maybe they'd worked on a server room or some other MEP work and were eager to make the jump.

People can gain experience. What makes the difference is having the right attitude. That’s something you cannot train.

SUDLOWS

“ When more than 884 million people (1 in 10 people) don't have access to clean drinking water, we shouldn't be using millions of gallons per day to slightly benefit our PUE” JOHN RIPPINGALE

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC, SUDLOWS CONSULTING

your auxiliary functions. And then you have all the different demands of the customers.

It's really challenging, but it's exciting putting 30 MW of power in a building. You go back 30 years and you'd struggle to find 30 MW of power across the whole of some cities.”

Moving East with the Demand When I ask most people about the future of their industries, they’re usually quick to throw around phrases like “the future is bright” or “the opportunities are boundless,” or “greater value for our shareholders.”

When I put the question to John, he pauses for a moment, frowning slightly. When he does respond, he seems determined to frame his answer carefully. He’s excited for the future, to be sure, but he’s also very cognizant that every reward has its risks. datacentremagazine.com

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INNOVATIVE DESIGN Both the UAE and India (not to mention the SEA markets where Sudlows Consulting is headed next) present some interesting design challenges, especially when working on huge projects for hypersustainable, hyper-efficient hyperscalers.

“Climate was one of the big challenges coming from the UK where you can do free cooling pretty much all year round. In Dubai - and also now in India - the ambient temperatures can sit for prolonged periods of time in the high thirties, and even up to the fifties as well,” Rippingale explains. “The heat is something you just can't avoid. To make things efficient in your external environment, you need to make them as efficient as possible inside the data centre.

On the power side, we make sure to closecouple everything from the UPS to the IT load to prevent losses. On the cooling side, if you're trying to run a data hall under 20 degrees, it doesn't matter what country you're in, it's

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not going to be efficient. Here in the Middle East and India, we're really trying to push our internal temperatures as high as we can without getting into areas that would be unsafe for human beings. We're usually running our whitespace at about 27 degrees, which does give us the opportunity to do some free cooling during the winter and reduce our PUE.” The other area to which Rippingale has clearly given a lot of careful thought is water.

“One thing we're very mindful of in the UAE and India is that one's a desert and one has water scarcity where people don't have secure access to clean drinking water. So, we don’t use water to cool our sites; it wouldn't be ethical or responsible,” he says emphatically. “When there's water scarcity, and more than 884 million people don't have access to safe water to drink, we shouldn't be using millions of gallons of it per day to slightly benefit our PUE; there are other ways.”

SUDLOWS

“The future is going to be challenging for everyone in the sector. It's going to be good, but it's definitely going to be a challenge as demand grows, time frames get shorter, sustainability gets more important, and skills are in shorter and shorter supply,” he says, adding that the international business’ rebranding into Sudlows Consulting is an important step towards “reinforcing to our clients that Sudlows Consulting is a fullyfledged, full-stack data centre consultancy,” capable of taking on any of the challenges that lie ahead.

“The first challenge now is getting the Singapore office up and running, which has been hampered by travel restrictions,” adds John, “but the biggest challenge is still going to be getting the right people, which COVID19 also isn't making any easier.”

However big the hurdles facing the entire industry at this pivotal moment in time, Sudlows Consulting is remarkably well equipped to capitalise on this unique opportunity. “Across the whole region (APAC) there's about 2.3 GW of data centre capacity active right now. That's going to double over the next three to five years. Even if every data centre building is 50 MW, that's still almost

“ It's exciting putting 30 MW of power in a building. You go back 30 years and you'd struggle to find 30 MW of power across the whole of some cities”

another 50 projects,” he says. “The demand is so much bigger than the supply, and that's just based on predictions; over the last few years, growth predictions have consistently turned out to be on the conservative side, so who knows how big things are going to get, and how fast it's going to happen.”

When it comes to competing in this world of unprecedented demand, Rippingale is confident that “Our specialist knowledge is going to stand us in good stead at a time when there are a lot of other players trying to get into this industry - largely because, outside of the data centre sector, the markets aren't doing so well.”

He reflects: “Just because you're an established general MEP consultancy and have one person in your organisation who knows about data centres, that doesn't really qualify you to be a data centre consultancy or expert. The reason we can deliver top level work is because we've got experienced, top-tier talent. There’s a saying in the Middle East that, if you want good bread, you should be ‘giving your bread dough to the baker,’ which means always go to the expert.”

JOHN RIPPINGALE

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF MEA & APAC, SUDLOWS CONSULTING datacentremagazine.com

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DEMOCRATISING DATA STORAGE

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Meet Ceph: the open source data storage solution helping decision makers find the flexibility, reliability, and scale to navigate a changing IT landscape

I

t should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade living under a rock that data has become the backbone, the body, the soul (the metaphor of your choice) of the modern world. Data storage, analysis, recovery, and management are mission critical capabilities for any enterprise - and the core value proposition for more than a few.

The data centre industry is experiencing an explosion of capacity throughout both mature and emerging markets, datasets are growing exponentially like some 1950s sci-fi special effect, and emerging tech trends like 5G, the IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, HPC, cold storage, and edge computing all conspire to pour gasoline on an already raging fire. Yet, the more critical that an effective data storage solution becomes to organisations and enterprises of all shapes and sizes, the more apparent it is that the solutions dominating the market today aren’t necessarily the right tools for the job.

“In retrospect especially, but even at the time there was a glaring hole in the market.

There was a clear need: everybody needed storage, it needed to be scalable, and there was no open source option; you had to buy expensive proprietary solutions,” reflects Sage Weil, Principal Ceph architect at Red Hat, and the founder and chief architect of Ceph. “There needed to be an open source alternative that was good, and that's the niche we've tried to fill.”

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CEPH

Ceph: open source data storage delivered flexibly at scale

The Ceph Foundation Since the first prototype of Ceph was launched back in 2007, the community of enterprises, organisations, and users that use it has grown to touch a huge number of spaces, from small businesses to large scale enterprises; from the scientific community to regional telecom carriers.

In November 2018, a cluster of organisations actively involved in the development, support, and commercialisation of Ceph formed the Ceph Foundation, launching the new initiative under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

The founding members included Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.

“I was pretty naive back then. I thought you just built something, open sourced it, and people would just start appearing to develop it, fix bugs, etc. and that's not how it works,” laughs Weil. “We had spent several years trying to add all the features that we thought Ceph had to have before people would be willing to use it,” before the launch of the Foundation in 2018.

“There are a lot of industry stakeholders that are selling or using Ceph as part of their business. So the Ceph Foundation became a way for those organisations to contribute funds that could be managed and spent to further Ceph's development and the community. Prior to the Foundation, it felt a lot more like begging going around asking 'who wants to pay for X or Y',” he adds. datacentremagazine.com

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“ Ceph is designed to provide a reliable storage service out of unreliable components” SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

“The Ceph Foundation is essential to the Ceph community and our customers because its members are all invested in the development and progression of Ceph,” says Aaron Joue, founder and CEO of Ambedded Technology - which combines Ceph technology with its own line of decentralised Arm servers.

The power of the Foundation, continues Kyle Bader, a Data Foundation Architect at Red Hat, lies in its ability to drive the industry to “deliver on the promise of democratising software defined storage through open source in a way that’s very similar in the way that Linux led to the democratisation of the operating system.”

That democratisation, adds Craig Chadwell, VP of Product at SoftIron, creates the necessary competition (centred around the foundation itself) to push the Ceph commercial ecosystem 158

December 2021

to even greater heights. “The Ceph community is very large and robust.

The Ceph Foundation helps to enliven and support that community, which in turn ensures that there will always be other options out there so that we can maintain that no vendor lock-in value proposition,” he explains. “It really forces us to continually challenge ourselves to deliver solutions that are uniquely solving customer problems, because the reality is, if a customer can move away and there's something providing more value out there, they will. It keeps us honest and on our toes.”

Philip Williams, Product Lead at Canonical, reflects that “a funny thing about the open source world is that essentially we’re all competitors, but we're also all working together to make something that is available for free even better.”

CEPH

Meet Ceph: Reliable, scalable, affordable. open source Developed by Weil - in collaboration with data storage researchers at the University of California: Santa Cruz, as well as at researchers from the country’s leading laboratories in Los Alamos and beyond Ceph is a distributed, open source data storage solution that grew to fill that glaring hole in the market Weil and his colleagues saw back in the 2000s.

“Ceph is designed to provide a reliable storage service out of unreliable components.

You take a bunch of individual hard drives that can fail, a bunch of networks that can fail, switches, servers that all individually are very fallible, you put them all together with Ceph and the net result is something that's highly reliable that tolerates any single point of failure - or in many cases many points of failure. It's highly available and highly scalable as well,” Weil explains, adding that Ceph is

also capable of providing object, block, and file storage all in one system on the same hardware.

Ceph’s distributed approach to data storage is hugely fault tolerant. Like a commercial airliner that can continue to fly with all but one engine out of commission, Ceph is robust enough to handle all but the most catastrophic of outages.

As a storage solution, Ceph’s appeal also lies in its open source, software defined design that - in addition to delivering reliability and flexibility at scale - excels at adding up to far more than the sum of any somewhat meagre parts you might happen to have lying around. “Ceph is open source, software defined, and meant to be run on any commodity hardware you want to buy or already have,” Weil says. “It doesn't matter which vendor you're buying your hardware from, whether you're using hard drives or SSDs, what kind of switches are in your network; it's fully software defined,” datacentremagazine.com

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CEPH

CANONICAL THE FULL SPECTRUM OF ENTERPRISE COMPUTE

and therefore a legitimate and long-awaited answer to market demand for alternatives to restrictive, proprietary storage solutions.

“Storage is quite an interesting industry.

It's kind of hidden; people don't really think about storage until it's either too expensive or it's not available and, worst case, all your data has been lost,” says Philip Williams, a Product Leader at Canonical. “So, it's this funny little world that's dominated by a number of very large players. The whole aim of the Ceph Foundation is not just to shepherd the upstream projects and this collaborative development work on Ceph itself, but also to demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players, and that their organisations don't have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph.”

Open source is the core of everything that happens inside Canonical. “All of our work is out in the open; it’s free to use, which I think is super important for storage technology, because you can understand what is actually going on inside the system.

That’s impossible when you’re using closed source or proprietary technologies,” says Philip Williams, Product Leader at Canonical.

“One thing that you see with traditional storage systems from the big players is that their growth is usually around scale up.

They'll have arbitrary limits on the number of disks you can add to a system.”

With datasets inside every organisation growing larger every day, Williams notes that “for people with quite significant amounts of data, public cloud and those traditional proprietary storage options typically aren't cost effective or feasible.”

As a result, Canonical - along with the rest of the Ceph community - is embracing the infinite scalability of Ceph to “demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players, and that their organisations don't have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph.”

Ceph’s open source, software defined nature means that organisations looking to deploy it can “choose any hardware you like, choose any vendor you like - or even no vendor at all - but if you build a Ceph system and you want to switch vendors or run things on your own, you can do that very easily.” datacentremagazine.com

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SOFTIRON - DELIVERING 21ST CENTURY INFRASTRUCTURE THE RIGHT WAY At its core, SoftIron asks the question of how to deliver 21st century infrastructure to meet the evolving demands centred around factors like resilience, performance, accessibility, and environmental impact. “We want to meet customers where they are. And we do that through building a set of task specific appliances that solve a variety of problems inside the data centre,” explains SoftIron’s VP of Product, Craig Chadwell. SoftIron’s solutions range from software defined infrastructure solutions that touch the computing and networking spaces to specific solutions for media encoding.

“If you take a holistic view of solving a problem, you can deliver a solution that is resilient, but with performance that’s way beyond what a traditional commodity based solution could provide,” says Chadwell.

SoftIron’s suite of storage solutions are powered by Ceph, but the entire company’s ethos is firmly aligned with the open source community as well. “One of the core premises of SoftIron’s value proposition is this notion of no vendor lock-in. We provide solutions that enable our customers to effectively swap us out if they choose,” Chadwell continues.

“Because of the way Ceph works and because organisations that comply with Ceph’s operating model can have products that work together seamlessly, it means that you can swap out a particular vendor's hardware without ever having to swap out Ceph, which means that everything above the Ceph layer from a service delivery perspective is unaffected by the lower level technology changes.

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“ Everybody needed storage, it needed to be scalable, and there was no open source option; you had to buy expensive enterprise solutions” SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

In addition to offering the unparalleled freedom to start from scratch, move freely within its ecosystem, and avoid both the vendor lock in agreements and cumbersome, expensive upgrade cycles that define managed, proprietary storage solutions, Weil adds that the beauty of Ceph is that “Because it's so flexible and built to scale, Ceph doesn't require a lot of foreknowledge about where your organisation's going to be in a couple of years time. You can just expand your hardware footprint in whatever direction you end up growing.”

Large storage systems - the kinds that are increasingly coming to define the cloud and data centre industries - are fundamentally dynamic. They grow and change in new and unexpected directions in response to the market and, with Ceph, organisations can grow and change with as little friction as possible. “You might start out with 10 servers from one vendor, and then five years later you're storing 12 times

CEPH

KEY PARTNERSHIPS SAGE WEIL TITLE: CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT Sage Weil is the lead architect and co-creator of the Ceph open source distributed storage system. Sage helped design Ceph as part of his PhD research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since finishing in 2007, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed storage system for Linux. Sage co-founded Inktank in 2012 to bring enterprise-quality open source storage to the enterprise. After Red Hat acquired Inktank in 2014, Sage has worked in Red Hat's Office of the CTO to improve Ceph and help shape Red Hat's overall storage strategy.

PHILIP WILLIAMS TITLE: PRODUCT LEADER, CANONICAL Philip is a Product Leader at Canonical responsible for Ceph and other storage solutions. He has over 15 years experience in the storage industry, having previously been responsible for storage infrastructure and products at a number of leading technology companies.

AARON JOUE TITLE: CEO, AMBEDDED Aaron Joue is the founder of Ambedded Technology. He is responsible for the business strategy and ensures the product development and support satisfy customers' needs. He accumulated experience when he worked for the defense and information technology industry.

His experience spans product design, hardware, software, storage, computing, and Manufacturing.

Aaron founded Ambedded in 2012 to create an innovative platform for software-defined storage to improve energy efficiency, availability, and performance. Before this, he was ever an outstanding engineer, factory manager, and VP of product.

KYLE BADER TITLE: DATA FOUNDATION ARCHITECT, RED HAT Kyle is the Data Foundation Architect covering both OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage products at Red Hat. His focus is at the intersection of open source, distributed storage systems, data engineering, and machine learning.

CRAIG CHADWELL TITLE: VP OF PRODUCT, SOFTIRON Craig has spent over a decade engineering, marketing, and leading product management of cloud and softwaredefined data center solutions. Craig has held positions at Lenovo, NetApp, and High Point University where he gained first-hand buyer and administration experience across the lifecycle of data center operations.

Craig has degrees in computer science, history, political science, and business administration.

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CEPH

as much data and you've been through three different hardware revisions all from different vendors, you've had to migrate data, change policy, and now you're storing a different type of data than you were before - it's all a total mess,” Weil laughs. “Often, your net system is going to be a mixture of all sorts of different stuff, and open source lends itself to solving those problems really well because you have the neutrality to be flexible and adaptable. If you're buying a proprietary solution from a particular vendor, you're going to have to buy more of the X solution that they allow you to interoperate with. You're locked into a particular path.” Ceph, he adds, not only frees organisations from those restrictive, vendor-defined upgrade paths, but opens up a huge, mature ecosystem of enterprises and community members to its user base.

Harnessing the Ceph community When it comes to harnessing the true value of Ceph, its commercial ecosystem and user community are pivotal. From companies like Red Hat that deliver Ceph solutions to Fortune 500 companies, to SoftIron which simplifies the Ceph adoption process through curated, in-house designed

RED HAT - CEPH AT PETABYTE SCALE Kyle Bader, Red Hat’s Data Foundation Architect, comes from an operations background. As such, he’s no stranger to the headaches that can accompany endeavours to be flexible in a large IT environment. “If you have a handful of proprietary appliances, that's probably fine and quite manageable, but at Red Hat we have several customers that are managing north of a hundred petabytes of data,” he explains. The growth in the amount of data being stored and managed, he continues, “is not stopping by any means. So, it becomes challenging once you get to larger scales.”

Red Hat’s business brings the power of open source ecosystems to large scale enterprises, leveraging everything from OpenShift to Kubernetes in order to take its customers’ IT infrastructure to the next level. Engineered for data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Red Hat’s Ceph Storage delivers software-defined storage on industry-standard hardware to organisations at any scale.

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AMBEDDED - ROBUST AND LOW POWER CEPH APPLIANCE "We think reliability, scalability, and simplicity are keys to our offering to the enterprise storage market," explains Aaron Joue, founder and CEO of Ambedded Technology. " Ambedded integrates Ceph software, the Arm microservers, and its tailorbuilt ceph manager GUI (UVS manager).

With the nature of arm microservers, enterprise storage customers could start deploying ceph from a tiny cluster to a petabyte-scale without an entry barrier.

Also, this ARM-based appliance results in an easy to operate, ultra -robust, minimum failure domain and low-power offering that enables customers to operate their desired cluster in a cost efficient way without complications.

"We had a project in Hong Kong where a customer wanted a very high availability storage system for CCTV applications," Joue continues. "The storage system needed to keep working, even if up to four storage servers failed at the same time. It will be costly by using a traditional storage solution and hard to achieve to keep the cluster running with 4 servers failing at the same time.” However, leveraging the ceph storage and the Ambedded microserver architecture, this HK customer easily achieved their goal even with a relatively small scale cluster.

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hardware that’s tailor made to support its deployment, Ambedded, Canonical, and beyond, the Ceph commercial ecosystem provides support and services that allow companies of any scale, maturity, or specialisation to deploy and benefit from distributed storage - all built on Ceph.

“When it comes to getting started with Ceph, it can be an issue knowing which servers to buy, which hard drives and how many,” Weil acknowledges. “That's where companies in the commercial ecosystem really add a lot of value, not to mention the open source community at large.”

CEPH

you're going to want something with a nice GUI that just works,” Weil notes. “So, over the last three to four years, there's been a huge investment of time and resources in the Ceph community on the usability front.

We've created a whole new, integrated GUI dashboard for Ceph for management.

We've also developed an orchestrator layer for Ceph that can call out to whatever tools you use to deploy it, so that you can do just about anything you need to do from the new GUI. I think we've made huge progress.”

Ceph for everyone Since the dawn of the open-source approach to software design, open source solutions have often garnered “a reputation for being really complicated to use,” Weil admits - adding that he and the Ceph team have spent the past few years painfully aware of that fact. Now, however, “A lot of the stigma surrounding open source in general has gone away in recent years,” he explains, something that perfectly aligns with the latest evolution of Ceph’s General User Interface (GUI).

“These days, if you're a small business and you need 100 terabytes of storage,

Challenges Enterprise storage is full of challenges.

Apart from the obvious spiralling quantity of data being generated, the applications that create and use that data are also increasingly diverse and changing almost daily. Storage, of course, is also not immune to the broader IT skills crisis that enterprises find themselves dealing with every day. Add to that the constant revolving door of mergers and acquisitions in the storage industry and it's hard not to find a storage manager that hasn't been burned by obsoleted or sidelined proprietary solutions that have fallen out of favour. It's little wonder then that a platform like Ceph - able to flex and grow to meet ever changing demands across a huge variety of use cases - and do all that from within a vibrant open source community eliminating the lock-in problem, becomes deeply compelling.

The Ceph decade Looking to the future, the intersection of market trends with Ceph’s constantly developing capabilities (Weil stresses that a sizable portion of the Foundation’s role is keeping up with cutting edge hardware developments to ensure Ceph continues to run smoothly, no matter what you plug it datacentremagazine.com

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CEPH USER TESTIMONIALS FUTURE PLC NAME: TOBY JACKSON, TITLE: GLOBAL SRE LEAD “Future PLC has grown in recent years through acquisition of over a dozen media brands and technology companies, bringing a complex and diverse data ecosystem. Future operates services on both cloud and on-premises infrastructure, leveraging technologies that need to balance value and flexibility. Future's technology team has also grown and diversified to meet these demands, requiring their SRE team to provide ever more robust and flexible solutions without compromising on stability or performance. As a content publisher, data is integral to Future's operation, and Ceph was the clear choice to ensure its technology teams had the tools at their disposal to manage data at scale.

Ceph allows Future to deploy storage across its datacenters, trusting that its data is distributed and available while enabling its development teams to self-manage storage requirements from Kubernetes with ease.

Future requires a storage solution that can not only grow in volume, but can handle diversity of locality, performance, distribution and access models; Ceph affords this flexibility under a common platform, reducing deployment complexity and simplifying its operational costs.”

DATACOMM CLOUD BUSINESS NAME: M R. LUK PHIN TIRTOKUNTJORO, TITLE: CTO “We have deployed, run and tested Ceph storage in our development environment for 2 years.

Once confident with the solution, we decided

to build Openstack Cloud using Ceph storage to provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to SMEs in Indonesia.

We have considered several storage solutions to work with our OpenStack cloud, including legacy storage and software-defined storage. As our cloud service targets SMEs, we need a solution that is cost-efficient, cloud-native ready, scalable, reliable, resilient, and with good performance.

We found Ceph storage to be a perfect fit after 2+ year trial experience. Furthermore, as we have three data centers located in 3 different sites, the RBD mirroring and simplicity to backup data from one data center to another in the Ceph cluster enhances our belief in choosing Ceph storage.

BLOOMBERG NAME: MATTHEW LEONARD, TITLE: E NGINEERING MANAGER, STORAGE Data is at the heart of Bloomberg’s technologies, which produce and distribute some of the most critical and valuable data in global business.

Maintaining the systems which store and process this data requires a unique mix of commodity hardware, open source software-defined storage, and vendor-agnostic appliance-based storage solutions.

In our diverse storage ecosystem, Bloomberg utilizes Ceph’s enterprise-level scalability and durability to support different applications and varied workloads across our organization. Ceph plays a significant role in Bloomberg's OpenStackpowered private cloud computing infrastructure, as well as underpins Bloomberg’s private S3-based object stores. As Bloomberg works toward contributing back to the Ceph project, we feel it is the right distributed storage technology for us -- both now and into the foreseeable future.

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“ Because it's so flexible and built to scale, Ceph doesn't require a lot of foreknowledge about where your organisation's going to be in a couple of years time. You can just expand your hardware footprint in whatever direction you end up growing”

into), as well as an ever-expanding ecosystem of vendors, users, and developers positions it ideally for a decade of meteoric growth. “Ceph is a pretty mature piece of software at this point,” Weil reflects. “All of the important stuff is there and, in addition to building it out further, we’re starting to add a lot of polish.”

Craig Chadwell, VP of Product at SoftIron, reflects that “open-source infrastructure has rapidly evolved and matured over the last decade and is in all likelihood going to be the way that most organisations deploy their IT footprint going forward.”

“People like to call Ceph the Linux of storage, which I think is appropriate,” adds Weil.

“Nobody thinks about which Unix they should buy because the open source one is the best, everyone's using it, and everyone is constantly improving it. Ceph is moving into that position in the storage space.”

SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT datacentremagazine.com

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