Data Centre Magazine - October 2021

October 2021 | datacentremagazine.com

Netrality

HOW A

TO BUILD

WINNING

BUSINESS

CULTURE Netrality’s CRO, Amber Caramella, is on a mission to create a revolutionary culture shift in the data centre industry Growing Global: The Art of Transatlantic Expansion

Emerging Data Centre Markets: From Nairobi to Osaka KAO Data: Supercomputing Sustainably FEATURING:

VERNE GLOBAL

IRON MOUNTAIN

INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

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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

OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JACK THOMPSON PRODUCTION EDITOR

JANET BRICE

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

KIERAN WAITE

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

SAM KEMP EVELYN HUANG MOTION DESIGNER

MEDIA SALES DIRECTORS

JASON WESTGATE GLEN WHITE MANAGING DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

TYLER LIVINGSTONE

JORDAN HUBBARD

MARKETING MANAGER

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

MARKETING DIRECTOR

PRESIDENT & CEO

DAISY SLATER

ROSS GARRIGAN PROJECT DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN

STACY NORMAN GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

Carbon Credits for Crypto Mining are Greenwashing a Dirty Industry Bitcoin miners are starting to get access to carbon credits - a disturbing new step in greenwashing an industry that uses more energy than all 3,040 large hospitals across the United States combined.

“It’s as if Beanie Babies not only facilitated narcotrafficking but also used more energy than all 3,040 large hospitals across the United States combined” TODD MOSS, MICHAEL PISA, CGD DATACENTRE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

I make no bones about my disdain for the practice of carbon offsetting. Private corporations paying money to other private corporations in exchange for scrubbing CO2 emissions from their balance sheets is bad enough.

Apply that to a hyper-dense, hyper wasteful industry like cryptocurrency mining, however, and the practice somehow becomes even more irresponsible.

BSO, in partnership with ImpactScope - a Swiss “social enterprise” company set up to provide offsetting solutions to crypto enthusiasts, bitcoin miners and digital asset marketplaces - “has become the first connectivity provider to offer clients that trade cryptocurrencies the means to calculate and offset the excess carbon emissions of their operations.”

Bitcoin production is estimated to generate between 22 and 22.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. If cryptocurrency miners are allowed to continue emitting amounts of carbon roughly equal to the annual emissions of Sri Lanka, while using readily available carbon credits (the proceeds from go to private corporations rather than government tax coffers) to report emissions in line with their ESG goals, then it will be an act of monumental climate irresponsibility.

HARRY MENEAR

harry.menear@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Creating Digital Communities

CONTENTS

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

The Five Steps of

Building a Data Centre 16 Trailblazer:

Marc Ganzi 20 Five Minutes With:

Assad Noori

40

Data Centres

Growing Global: the art of transatlantic expansion

26

50

How Netrality built a winning business culture

Unlimited potential, backed by the planet

Netrality Data Centres

Verne Global

96

Technology

Pushing the limits of data centre efficiency

68 72

Networking

The rising tide of submarine cabling

80 76Mountain Iron

Iron Data Centers IronMountain mountain and Werks Data Centers: Iron Web Mountain Data Centers and Web growing together Werks Data Centers: Growing Together

104

Infrastructure Masons Bridging the talent gap in a booming industry

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150 Top 10

Emerging data centre markets

128

Critical Environments

KAO data: sustainable HPC at scale

138

Huawei Technologies

Huawei’s Sanjay Kr Sainani on pre-Fabricated data centers, zero carbon and leveraging AI for automation & efficiency

162

Oper8 Global Filling in the gaps

BIG PICTURE “ Cambridge-1 and the continued efforts of its founding partners will be instrumental for the future of humankind” LEE MYALL CEO, KAO DATA

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October 2021

Sustainable Supercomputing Harlow, England

Since 2014, Kao Data has been striving to deliver high-performance colocation services to the UK market in a greener way.

Today, Kao’s Harlow campus plays host to NVIDIA's Cambridge-1, the most powerful supercomputer in the UK. Not only is Kao helping to set the bar for HPC in the country, but it’s supporting research into drug discovery and genome sequencing using 100% renewable energy and green UPS backup.

READ MORE

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THE BRIEF

READ MORE

“Strides have been made, and the [data centre] sector has laid the groundwork to continue on a greener growth path” Brian Johnson,

Data Centre Segment Head, ABB

READ MORE

“FRANKLY, NO ONE IN THE UK IS WORKING HARDER TO PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF DATA CENTRE SUSTAINABILITY THAN US” Lee Myall, CEO Kao Data

READ MORE

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October 2021

Total tax cuts received by Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft

$968,936.67

Chief Development Officer and Founder Yondr Group

For local economies, hyperscale tax cuts do not equal job growth. Based on tax figures relating 15 hyperscale projects in the US between 2015 and 2021…

837

Pete Jones,

BY THE NUMBERS $811mn

“IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT VIRTUALLY EVERY MAJOR DATA CENTRE OPERATOR HAS A PRESENCE IN [NORTHERN VIRGINIA]”

Cost per job to city councils

Long-term jobs created

EDITOR'S CHOICE HUAWEI SMASHES DATA CENTRE PUE RECORD WITH 1.111 SCORE PUE readings have remained relatively flat for the past decade, but Huawei just pushed the envelope with a reading of 1.111 in a recent test.

READ MORE

CYRUSONE CEO BRUCE DUNCAN DEPARTS COMPANY Appointed following the abrupt departure of his predecessor Gary Wojtaszek in February of last year, Duncan held the position for just 13 months.

READ MORE

WILL FLOATING SOLAR END SINGAPORE’S DATA CENTRE MORATORIUM? With Sunseap set to build a 2.2 GW, 1,600 hectare floating solar farm, Singapore’s data centre freeze might be due for a thaw.

READ MORE

From cowtown to server farm Columbus, Ohio, wants to be the midwestern US’ next cloud hub, converting hundreds of acres of farmland into the foundations of a new ‘data centre alley’.

How’s that going?

In the short term? Pretty well. Google recently announced an extra $1bn investment to expand its campus in the neighbouring town of New Albany, and bought another 600+ acres in Columbus and Lancaster. Both sites used to be farms.

What about the long term?

Ehh… maybe not so great. You see, much like sporting arenas or a new Amazon HQ, data centres are often courted by multiple city or state governments. These metros offer up huge tax breaks in the realm of tens of millions of dollars per hyperscale site in Ohio, which would be fine if data centres actually created any jobs.

They don’t?

Nope. Most hyperscale campuses just need one technician for every 40,000 racks. This means the Columbus city council is foregoing almost $47mn to create just 20 long-term jobs.

That’s insane.

I know, right? Personally, I’d stick to the dairy business.

 NIGERIA The country’s data centre market is booming along with its skyrocketing population. The Nigerian data centre industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2021 and 2026, far outperforming the global average..  NVIDIA The chip maker's stock has surged recently as a string of reports found that the data centre industry’s demand for semiconductors isn’t going anywhere but up.  WATER CONSUMPTION In the face of mounting criticism across multiple markets, the data centre industry is taking steps to drastically cut water consumption, from Facebook’s three water restoration projects in Mesa, Arizona, to Aligned energy securing $12.5bn in funding to build fully waterless facilities.  INTEL While strong market demand could see this trend reverse itself in the coming year, Intel’s data centre business is nevertheless on the rocks due to stiffening competition from Arm and NVIDIA, as well as several hyperscalers exploring the process of making their own chips.

W A Y U P OCT 21

W A Y D O W N

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TIMELINE

THE FIVE STEPS OF BUILDING A DATA CENTRE

Data centre construction is booming. Despite the rising cost of materials and real estate, the data centre construction market is expected to grow by $8.7bn over the next four years, achieving a CAGR of more than 10%. More than 100 hyperscale data centres were built last year, with hundreds of more new projects already in the pipeline.

PHASE

PHASE

Assessment

Planning

Once a developer finalises the project’s goals and target customer, the assessment phase usually begins with site selection. Choosing the right location for a data centre can have a massive impact on things like the facility’s access to renewable energy or ability to do free cooling.

This phase (along with the design process) can sometimes take place alongside or even before the site selection and assessment process. The developer outlines the different parameters the site will need to fulfil, from a target PUE, whether to build greenfield or retrofit an existing site, levels of power redundancy, and whether the site will be built in multiple phases or all at once.

01

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02

PHASE

PHASE

PHASE

Design

Construction & Commissioning

Operation

03

This is where the broad criteria established in the assessment and planning phases solidify into answers to specific questions like how many racks the data centre will have, how the building’s power can meet certain standards like LEED certification, and how individual server halls will be laid out.

04

This phase is all about execution of the site’s design, and typically involves extensive collaboration with partners and contractors.

The timeline of a build can vary wildly - a simple 2 MW colocation facility could be online in just a few months, whereas a 200 MW hyperscale campus might be under construction for year.

05

In order to maximise revenues and begin to create ROI, operators will try to keep the time between the completion of a data hall and the move in date for its customers as short as possible. Once a facility spins up, it also begins generating data about itself, allowing for on-the-fly tweaks and redesigns which can further improve the performance of later stages of the facility. datacentremagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

Betting Big on the Future of Digital Infrastructure Company: Name: Marc Ganzi Job Title: President and CEO

T

he President and CEO of DigitalBridge, Marc Ganzi, has spent more than two decades as one of the most influential leaders in the digital infrastructure and real estate sectors. From telco towers to wireless connectivity infrastructure, Ganzi has consistently proven himself a shrewd investor and capable business leader. Now, he’s betting big on the role of data centres in the digitally transformed world for tomorrow.

In a recent interview, Ganzi painted a picture of a hyper-personalised, hyperintelligent world, where wearables, biometric security, and highly automated smart apartments that know how much “Pellegrino, butter, eggs, whatever” to order online every morning are the norm. “We’re creatures of habit; we like what we like,” he explained, adding that “generally speaking, 90% of those decisions we’d certainly like made for us.”

Ganzi’s more than just a blue sky futurist, however; he’s throwing his considerable business acumen and capital resources behind ventures intended to support (and profit from) the new age of intelligent real estate.

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TRAILBLAZER

“ The question ultimately is, how do we transport that data? How do we manufacture that data?

How do we store that data?”

His company, DigitalBridge, currently manages more than $30bn worth of digital infrastructure real estate, including more than 440,000 tower sites, over 38,000 small cell nodes, over 100 data centres and a fiber network of over 130,000 route miles across a portfolio of 22 subsidiary companies under its umbrella. DigitalBridge’s portfolio includes Data Bank, EdgePoint Infrastructure, Landmark Dividend, Scala Data Centers, Vantage Data Centres, and more.

There are few people alive today who are driving this much investment into the future of digital infrastructure.

Ganzi has also served as the CEO of Colony Capital, orchestrating the real estate 18

October 2021

investment trust’s multi-billion dollar pivot into the digital infrastructure sector last year. He held up trends like the growth of 5G, edge, and IoT adoption as driving forces behind future demand, explaining in an interview last year that service providers in the future will share more infrastructure than previously, a trend he sees as playing into Colony Capital’s new strengths as a tower, fibre, small cell, and data centre services provider as old ways of operating networks and delivering digital services disappear.

Calling traditional network architecture “old thinking”, Ganzi stressed that old processes like backhauling networks were outdated. “The new style of thinking

is fronthauling that network, having software-defined networks where you can deploy multiple spectrum bands across multiple antenna departure places,” he explained.

Colony and DigitalBridge may be independent entities, but the two businesses have a close working relationship thanks to Ganzi’s ongoing involvement in their leadership and digital-focused strategies.

Before Colony Capital and Digital Bridge, Ganzi founded telecom infrastructure company Global Tower Partners in 2003, which grew to become one of the largest privately-owned tower

companies in the US under his leadership.

Global Tower Partners was acquired by American Tower Corporation in 2013 for $4.8bn. Before that, he worked as a consulting partner for DB Capital Partners from 2000 to 2002 where he oversaw the institution’s investments in the Latin American tower sector. Ganzi has held a number of other executive roles within the real estate and digital infrastructure sectors throughout his career, as well as a stint as a White House intern under the G.H.W. Bush administration in 1989, and was also a world-class polo player, and was part of the team that won the US Open Polo Championship in 2009. datacentremagazine.com

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

ASSAD NOORI FOLLOWING A SIX-YEAR STINT AS THE CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER OF THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN INFRASTRUCTURE BUSINESS AT ATOS, ASSAD NOORI TOOK ON THE ROLE OF MANAGING DIRECTOR FOR INTERXION’S UK OPERATIONS IN JUNE 2021. AS HE SETTLES INTO HIS NEW ROLE, WE SAT DOWN WITH ASSAD TO GET HIS INSIGHTS ON THE UK’S DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY, THE GLOBAL SKILLS SHORTAGE, AND HOW THE NEW JOB IS GOING SO FAR.

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October 2021

Q. AS THE UK AND EUROPE START TO RE-OPEN IN THE MIDST OF ONGOING VACCINE ROLLOUTS, HOW ARE YOU SEEING THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY HANDLE THE TRANSITION TO A POSTLOCKDOWN ECONOMY?

» Technologically, the demand for

cloud-enabled services was already rising prior to the pandemic, but lockdowns dramatically increased adoption and this isn’t looking likely to slow any time soon. When the majority of people were staying at home, everything shifted online – from shopping, to socialising and crucially, working. This meant that enterprises were forced to inspect their own digital transformation

“ THE ACQUISITION AND RETENTION OF TALENT IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF A STABLE, HEALTHY, GROWING BUSINESS”

agendas. For many it kick-started their transformation, for others it accelerated it, and even slowest to embrace digital are now at least readying themselves for large-scale working from home. No matter which category a business falls into hybridcloud strategies will be here to stay and will only grow in importance.

When looking at the transition from an organisational perspective, the priority is how do we safely bring people back to work, whenever that may be? The pandemic has transformed how we work and we’ve now established a more collaborative, hybrid way of working which I believe is here to stay – five days a week in the office is a thing of the past.

My priority is to offer options to our employees at Interxion, allowing them to balance work and home in a way that’s most productive for them.

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

“ WE’VE ESTABLISHED A MORE COLLABORATIVE, HYBRID WAY OF WORKING WHICH I BELIEVE IS HERE TO STAY – FIVE DAYS A WEEK IN THE OFFICE IS A THING OF THE PAST” Q. HOW ARE YOU SEEING OTHER TRENDS - LIKE THE INDUSTRY SKILLS SHORTAGE - AFFECT DATA CENTRE STAFFING?

» Having been in the industry for over

20 years, I know that the acquisition and retention of talent is the holy grail of a stable, healthy, growing business.

The rapid digital transformation we have seen over the last 18 months has exposed the skills shortage even more clearly, as we have had to provide stable and reliable services to meet the huge surge in demand. At the same time, the industry has seen considerable attrition, as people have reflected over the pandemic and made moves.The skills shortage is likely to be a challenge for years to come, but the onus is on us as the employer to enrich our workforce by giving them a good work-life balance and equipping them with a vision of what their career will look like, at that company, in the future.

Q. HOW CAN THE INDUSTRY OVERCOME A SKILL SHORTAGE AT A TIME WHEN THE NEED FOR DATA CENTRE STAFF IS ONLY EXPECTED TO GROW?

» I strongly believe that you must

build the culture you want to see. The industry needs to attract new talent by showing them a viable and exciting 22

October 2021

career path and equipping them with the skills they need to succeed – not just offering them a job.

Q. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE OTHER TRENDS YOU SEE ON THE HORIZON FOR THE COMING YEAR?

» What we saw during COVID-19 was a surge in demand for colocation space.

Some businesses raced ahead to buy space to meet the demands of a hybrid workforce, however, there was little

knowledge of exactly how much space was actually needed.I also think we will soon see an increase in demand for affordable data centres outside of the capital, as space in central London’s data centres is premium and pricing is only going to increase. The final trend we are likely to see is larger enterprises selling their data centres. Not only are profit and margins a real driver, but compliance and regulatory controls are also important factors that influence enterprise’s IT decision making. datacentremagazine.com

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Meet the Top 100 Leaders in Technology

OUT NOW A BizClik Media Group Brand

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.com

TOP LEAD ERS 2021

NOMINATE

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Creating Digital Communities

How

NETRALITY is revolutionising

the Digital Ecosystem WRITTEN BY: SIMON HOWSON-GREEN

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October 2021

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

NETRALITY

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NETRALITY

Netrality’s CRO, Amber Caramella, talks about her ground-breaking, winning vision for cultural change across the data centre industry

N

etrality’s CRO, Amber Caramella, is driving groundbreaking change across the organisation’s expanding footprint of network-rich, fibre-dense facilities and the data centre landscape as a whole. The trailblazing leader’s multi-fold approach to progressive change extends beyond acquiring and further monetising portfolio assets.

Caramella is ensuring Netrality Data Centers’ continuous investments in infrastructure enhancements, ecosystem expansions, and portfolio growth provide a diverse platform for evolving needs and full-suite solutions.

We live in an increasingly frantic world, especially when you look at the digital infrastructure landscape linked with the unpredictability brought on by COVID in the past year and a half. So, what impact and challenges does Caramella see the industry facing over the next few years?

“The pandemic certainly further solidified that technology is fundamentally changing the way that we interact with the world around us.

“Many technological advancements adopted during COVID kept us together when we needed to be apart. Numerous industries accelerated their digital transformation efforts by enabling advancements in telehealth, video conferencing, online education, and virtual gaming to help us stay healthy, entertained, and connected both personally and professionally.

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October 2021

“That said, I see several challenges. One being the increase in the amount of data and capacity demands placed on data centres with the evolution of technology and the expansion of always-on users. The supply chain continues to struggle due to extensive global shortages of labour, materials, and equipment resulting in longer lead times. Further investment in digital infrastructure will be crucial to enable and sustain such growth.

“The second challenge is ensuring an optimal customer experience given unprecedented bandwidth demands and the proliferation of data-intensive technologies.”

This is where Netrality comes in. But how?

“Increased bandwidth demands are driving the migration of data processing to the nexus of

“OUR OFFERING IS UNIQUE IN THAT OUR DATA CENTRES ARE AT THE EPICENTRE OF THE EDGE IN THE MARKETS WE SERVE — ENABLING GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

connectivity and the network edge. The rise of hybrid cloud and latency-sensitive technologies require a modern infrastructure approach.

Traditional cloud and legacy networks cannot adequately respond to and serve an evergrowing number of IoT devices.

“Interconnected data centres located near end-users, are fundamental to businesses and services. More enterprises are leveraging edge computing to actualise the full potential of their application services. When it comes to providing services in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner, edge computing is essential.

“Our offering is unique in that our data centres are at the epicentre of the edge in the markets we serve — enabling global connectivity. By leveraging highly interconnected edge data centres, customers can dramatically extend their performance and reach across entire regions with superior uptime, low latency, and on-demand connectivity.”

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NETRALITY

“OUR HIGHLY EFFICIENT, DYNAMIC, AND SCALABLE ENVIRONMENTS ATTRACT AN ECOSYSTEM OF STRATEGIC PROVIDERS WHO CONTRIBUTE CRITICAL SOLUTIONS NEEDED TO CURATE MODERN IT ARCHITECTURE” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

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October 2021

But that’s just a small glimpse at the bigger picture.

“Just as our data centres are the epicentre of the edge, the ecosystem is the epicentre of growth. In a networkneutral, interconnected data centre, ecosystem partners not only house their infrastructure but, more importantly, seamlessly connect and exchange traffic with one another. When customers can directly connect to service providers and cloud on-ramps in a colocation environment it reduces single points of failure and latency via direct connection.

It also lowers costs by bypassing the public internet. Ecosystems can scale to accommodate customer’s unique needs.

Amber Caramella TITLE: CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED STATES Amber Caramella is the Chief Revenue Officer at Netrality Data Centers. She is responsible for Netrality’s revenue generation strategies and execution, including overseeing sales, marketing, interconnection, network solutions as well as, strategic alliances, and channel partnerships.

Amber has more than 20 years' experience in the telecommunications and technology industries, having held various positions in sales and leadership. She is on Infrastructure Masons’ Advisory Council, the Global Executive Sponsor for IM Women, and is part of the organization’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee that raises awareness and education for underrepresented groups. Amber holds a Board of Directors position at Virtual Power Systems.

With her extensive experience in digital infrastructure, her goal is to increase the visibility and career advancement of women to build a diverse pipeline of future industry talent.

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“BEING WHERE THERE'S A DENSITY OF CONNECTIVITY MATTERS. OUR INTERCONNECTED DATA CENTRES IN STRATEGIC LOCATIONS ALLOW MODERN, DATA-INTENSIVE BUSINESSES TO REACH THEIR MAXIMUM POTENTIAL” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

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NETRALITY

Title of the video

“By introducing customers to an entire ecosystem of providers, Netrality enables optimal solutions while lowering their total cost of ownership. “Netrality customers can design new solutions and innovations such as, hybrid-cloud architectures with secure, scalable connectivity to increase application performance and provide greater reliability.”

No company or industry in this interconnected world can operate as an island. Netrality knows this.

Strategic partnerships hold the key to market-leading growth. Caramella says this approach is vital.

“To further the evolution of our data center ecosystem and market position, we align our brand with influential industry leaders, providing increased visibility, go-to-

market resources, event sponsorships, and co-branded campaigns.”

Caramella cites Netrality’s recent venture with Google Cloud Interconnect at its Kansas City, MO location. She calls this deal a ‘game changer’.

“Google recently deployed a Google Cloud Interconnect at 1102 Grand, creating additional cloud connectivity options in our data centre and enabling direct connectivity to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It’s a game-changer because customers can extend their infrastructure, business applications, and capabilities with a multi-cloud, multisite network environment. It also allows higher speeds and lower connectivity costs for our customers. datacentremagazine.com

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NETRALITY

Welcome to the Block

So how is Netrality keeping ahead of the game? Caramella says the cornerstone of Netrality’s strategy and competitive advantage is the ownership and operation of its data centre assets.

“We are leveraging the dynamic nature of our physical assets and efforts to market wholesale, office, retail, innovation, and business continuity spaces where appropriate and opportunistic across the portfolio.

“Our owner-operator business model is also beneficial because it provides our customers with long-term reliability, stability, and scalable growth opportunities from cabinets to cages to wholesale data centre offerings. Additionally, we have the ability to custom design deployments that require roof rights. All of our locations are technically sound for cell tower and 5G operators to occupy.”

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Caramella sees this ownership strategy as a huge advantage over Netrality’s competitors — many of whom lease colocation properties. This ownership also adds to Netrality’s market prominence and ability to capitalise the value of its assets and the role they play in shaping the digital economy.

“Our building assets are the epitome of our ecosystem as are our data centres. As the owner and operator of our buildings, we have positioned our properties as the premier hubs for tenants looking to power innovations of tomorrow. We are unparalleled in our ability to deliver dense connectivity and extensive deployments that create optimal testing and innovative environments for 5G supported equipment.

Netrality provides the flexibility needed to meet unique testing and design needs while delivering the best overall experience to our data centre customers and building tenants.”

NETRALITY

“NETRALITY PROVIDES A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT THAT ENCOURAGES EMPLOYEES TO LEVERAGE EACH OTHER'S STRENGTHS IN ORDER TO ATTAIN MUTUAL AND COMMUNAL PROSPERITY” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

Netrality’s leadership began acquiring strategic assets with core interconnection data centres back in 2012. Netrality adds to the deep history of each facility by building Meet Me Rooms to congregate fibre assets and facilitate interconnection – the cornerstone of innovation.

“Take for example our operations in Philadelphia, PA. For over 90 years, 401 North Broad has served as a base for innovation. It was originally designed as the nation’s first commercial and industrial building featuring a freight station and access to rail infrastructure.

Since the early 1990s, 401 North Broad has been a major junction for North

“ OUR BUILDING ASSETS ARE THE EPITOME OF OUR ECOSYSTEM AS ARE OUR DATA CENTRES. AS THE OWNER AND OPERATOR OF OUR BUILDINGS, WE HAVE POSITIONED OUR PROPERTIES AS THE PREMIER HUB FOR TENANTS LOOKING TO POWER INNOVATIONS OF TOMORROW” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

Esports campus “The Block”, by Nerd Street Gamers is located in Netrality’s 401 North Broad

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NETRALITY

and South fibre routes with a significant portion of the nation’s East coast traffic traveling through the property.

“Netrality’s 401 North Broad continues to house companies on the cutting-edge of innovation including “The Block”, the world’s first esports campus by Nerd Street Gamers.

The immense connectivity options and nearzero latency within 401 North Broad give gamers a competitive edge both on and off the premise – connecting communities and advancing the next-generation of gaming.

“Leading biotech firm, Biomeme, is building its headquarters for research, manufacturing, and operations of its PCR testing solutions at 401 North Broad as well.”

As you mentioned, acquiring the most strategically placed locations is key. Where else is Netrality casting its net?

“Our most recent acquisition of the Indy Telcom campus in Indianapolis, IN will allow us to further expand our footprint across the Midwest. This aligns with our core strategy to own the epicentre of connectivity in the markets we serve. As the only data centre campus near downtown Indianapolis, Indy Telcom facilitates access to the fibre crossroads of America providing connectivity to Chicago, St. Louis, Columbus, Kansas City and Pittsburgh – making it a premier data centre for telecom companies and enterprise customers. We are eager to expand our footprint and accelerate business growth in the robust, network-rich region.”

Caramella highlights how her industry is constantly transforming with technology and how it operates.

“Right now, trends are shifting, and secondary and tertiary markets are increasingly relevant because of hybrid cloud deployments that seek diversified fibre connectivity, expanded datacentremagazine.com

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NETRALITY

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“THROUGH DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND EARLY EXPOSURE, WE WORK TOWARDS EMPOWERING THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY, TODAY’S YOUTH, AND A “NEW NORMAL” THAT WE ARE PROUD OF” AMBER CARAMELLA CRO, NETRALITY

availability zones, and direct connections to core backbone routers in urban-situated colocation facilities. Location is incredibly important in terms of where companies are deploying points of presence and availability zones. We are focused on strategic capacity planning to stay ahead of supply and demand challenges.

“Our ecosystems allow each Netrality building to act as an interconnected hub joining hundreds of cloud and network service providers with leading enterprises.”

Caramella is also very conscious of how recent global events are shaping the industry’s need to be versatile and nimble.

“This last year has taught us a lot.

Companies with traditional in-office environments had to leverage technology to support remote workforces and ensure business continuity – proving a new, geographically dispersed workforce is viable when supplemented with collaborative technologies. While the pandemic and resulting mandates have brought immeasurable loss, the past few years have signalled the true entry into an era of global digitalisation. Working together as an ecosystem and leveraging evolving technologies enable and aid the adaptation to new realities on the horizon.

Digital infrastructure and transformation

will continue to allow masses to effectively operate from anywhere.”

Caramella talks about how Netrality’s success and growth is rooted in its commitment to nurture synergies between its strategically located ecosystems and robust partner offerings.

Underpinning such success is an everevolving culture she is creating between Netrality’s workforce and its partners.

“I’m extremely passionate about creating the right culture here at Netrality,” she says. “I truly believe that fostering a healthy environment not only drives revenue growth, but also promotes our retention and employee satisfaction. This, in turn, translates to multi-threaded, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers.”

For Caramella, creating an entrepreneurial, diverse, and inclusive corporate culture directly impacts the organisation’s ability to drive meaningful change across the industry.

“It all comes down to our network. One of Netrality’s core values is to empower its network of customers, partners, and people to thrive and build the innovative technologies powering the digital-first era.”

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GROWING GLOBAL:

THE ART OF TRANSATLANTIC EXPANSION Matt Pullen EVP, Managing Director, Europe, CyrusOne

Pete Jones, Chief Development Officer and Founder, Yondr Group

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DATA CENTRES

We take a look at the European growth strategy for US data centre operator CyrusOne, and the plans that European firm Yondr has for the US. WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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he data centre industry is booming, as both mature and emerging markets experience high levels of investment and growth. Demand for hyperscale, traditional colocation, and edge facilities is rising along with a global spike in the amount of data being created and consumed on a daily basis.

However, as we explore elsewhere in this edition of Data Centre Magazine, data centre operators are facing an increasing number of challenges in order to capitalise on the rising tide of demand. The need for sustainable design and operating practice is no longer a competitive advantage but a mission critical priority. Construction costs are rising as well, as the price of both materials and real estate in saturated markets continue to climb. Lastly, the industry finds itself increasingly in the grip of a generational skills shortage, as engineers retire faster than the sector can attract new talent - and automation struggles to evolve fast enough to compensate.

The opportunities are huge, as are the hurdles. In order to capitalise on this pivotal

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DATA CENTRES

Yondr MicroBloc Data Centre

“It’s no surprise that virtually every major data centre operator has a presence in [Northern Virginia]” PETE JONES

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER AND FOUNDER, YONDR GROUP

point in the history of the data centre sector, many companies are looking to expand overseas.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, where a hyper-saturated data centre industry is still recovering from the 2019 data centre construction Moratorium, Yondr Group is pressing ahead with a pan-US expansion of unprecedented scale - which kicked off earlier this year with the announcement of a 500 MW development in Northern Virginia, already the world’s most heavily-developed data centre market.

At the same time, Texan data centre giant CyrusOne is heading in the opposite

direction. Already well-established in the US and Europe’s five key markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin – also known as the FLAP-D markets), CyrusOne is continuing to expand overseas, this time into less competitive secondary markets with massive potential for growth. We caught up with Pete Jones, Chief Development Officer and Founder at Yondr Group, and Matt Pullen, EVP and Managing Director of CyrusOne’s European operations, to find out more about the trends pushing driving these two massive data centre footprint expansions in what initially appears to be opposite directions. datacentremagazine.com

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Yondr Group: Betting Big on the World’s Biggest Markets Yondr Group brought its first facility online back in 2011, delivering 30 MW of capacity in Finland - a particularly sizable achievement given how much smaller data centres tended to be in an age when hyperscale was still more or less the sole province of Google and Facebook. Since then, the group has grown rapidly year-on-year, focusing on delivering massive builds at impressive speeds.

In May of 2021, the Yondr Group announced a massive $2bn investment in expanding its footprint throughout the Americas. "The Americas represent a significant opportunity for Yondr Group," said Dave Newitt, CEO and Founder of Yondr Group, earlier this year. "Already, the USA's data centre capacity alone is more than twice that of Europe. And it's continuing to grow, with a predicted 11GW of capacity in place by 2025.” Keen to be a leading part of that growth trend, Yondr announced a “global scaling strategy” to massively grow its footprint across five continents by 2024.

That strategy crystallised into definite action in June of this year, when Yondr snapped up 270 acres of land throughout Loudoun and Prince William Counties in Northern Virginia. The metro area is already the world’s largest data centre market and home to almost 170 hyperscale and colocation facilities.

Not deterred by an already saturated market, Yondr is betting big on continually increasing demand with a plan to build a full 500 MW of data centre capacity across the land it’s purchased, almost doubling its entire global footprint with a single project.

Given the fact that Northern Virginia was previously sitting at more than 1.2 GW of total leased data centre absorption to 44

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date and approximately 240 MW of critical data centre capacity currently under construction, Yondr’s project could still make a splash, even in this very big, very crowded pond.

“As we mapped out our expansion plans in the Americas, we saw the growing demand from our client base to be located in Northern Virginia,” explains Jones, adding that, thanks to its proximity to major fibre paths and access to cheap power, “it’s no surprise that virtually every major data centre operator has a presence in this metro.” Work on the new sites is expected to begin before the end of the year.

As this is Yondr’s biggest single project to date, in a market where the company

Yondr Metrobloc Data Centre

has limited experience, I asked Jones about how broader challenges facing the industry might present an obstacle to the company’s ambitious plans. “Competition for skilled talent is always tough, so bringing new talent in from related sectors is something we spend a lot of time thinking about,” he admits, although he adds that because “we are a vertically integrated group of companies that includes both a general contractor and two commissioning companies… the ability to control our own domestic supply chain makes life easier.”

He continues to note that Yondr isn’t focusing solely on tier one markets, adding that “metros like Northern Virginia are one of many milestones we are looking to achieve

Northern Virginia: The World’s Biggest Market Northern Virginia is currently the world’s largest single market for data centre construction, with more than 1.2 GW of total leased data centre absorption to date and approximately 240 MW of critical data centre capacity currently under construction. The market - despite higher levels of saturation than anywhere else in the world - is expected to grow by 13.8% in 2020 alone, despite already being more heavily developed in terms of data centre capacity than any other stretch of land on the planet.

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Yondr hyperbloc Data Centre

FLAP-D: The Heart of Europe’s Data Centre Industry Currently, the vast majority of hyperscale and colocation data centres within Europe are located within the region’s five most mature markets. In four out of five of the FLAP-D (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin), account for the majority of in-country data centre raised floor space, with London being the only one of the FLAP-D markets to account for less than half (48%) of the country’s data centre capacity. Frankfurt accounts for 68% of Germany’s data centre industry capacity, and Dublin is home to a staggering 98% of the data centre capacity within Ireland – a fact which has led to vocal scrutiny and possible regulatory reform over the summer.

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globally”, painting a picture of an expansion plan that prioritises “evaluating established metros as well as lesser-known territories.”

CyrusOne: The FLAP-D and Beyond CyrusOne’s European portfolio alone accounts for approximately 200 MW of critical IT capacity across Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin.

Going forward, however, the company says it plans to also focus on expanding its presence in emerging and secondary markets with potential for growth.

As CyrusOne’s MD of European operations, Pullen is quick to point out that new growth into underserved markets doesn’t mean the company plans to let its existing footprint stagnate. “As a company, we remain focused on expanding within existing markets, in large part, because of the economies of scale we get on operating costs across a campus. We are always

DATA CENTRES

looking to capitalise on success from key markets to maintain sustainable annual growth, such as London, Frankfurt and Paris,” he explains.

However, he adds that “we are also reviewing new market entries when those markets demonstrate the following characteristics - strong GDP; recently established hyperscale region; epicentre of initial availability zones; limited supply and competition.”

The holy grail of this second aspect of CyrusOne’s strategy would appear to be Spain.

“The increase of construction costs is also a big trend that we are seeing hit Europe right now, which is in contrast to the monopolistic customers seeking to drive headline leasing rates down,” says Pullen. As rising costs continue to make life harder for new data centre

developments in mature markets, CyrusOne is also expanding its footprint with a new data centre in Madrid. “This is our first planned European facility outside of the traditional data centre market hubs,” Pullen explains, adding that the 21 MW facility will allow CyrusOne’s customers “to rapidly scale digital transformation strategies by deploying critical infrastructure at the heart of this enterprise and emerging hyperscale market.”

Spain is a particularly attractive market for new developments, according to Pullen. “There has been a major acceleration of data centre capacity in Spain over the last few years, and in 2020 Madrid was one of the fastestgrowing European markets,” he explains.

“Our investment in the region is another milestone on our European roadmap as

CyrusOne - Hybrid Cloud

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“ It takes a different approach to manage an enterprise customer base than a hyperscaler” MATT PULLEN EVP

MANAGING DIRECTOR, EUROPE, CYRUSONE

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CyrusOne, Dublin Data Centre

we continue to expand our footprint across the continent to provide coverage, capacity and connectivity requirements to support our customers’ ambitions.”

When asked to compare CyrusOne’s activities and strategy in Europe versus the US, Pullen reflects that “In the US, the business has been running for a long time through the various cycles of enterprise and hyperscalers, in terms of customer base. For example, it takes a different approach to manage an enterprise customer base than a hyperscaler.

The enterprise customer tends to rely on us a lot more to run their environment, and we, therefore, deploy technology that allows a more managed environment; whereas the hyperscalers largely operate independently.”

On the other hand, “In Europe, 93% of our customer base are hyperscalers. Dealing with hyperscale companies is all about being able to contract efficiently through existing global framework agreements and satisfy design and delivery with a right-sized global and local organisation. The hyperscalers are lacking in commercial resources – they do not have the bandwidth to deal with new entrants who do not have the established contractual terms, as well as design and delivery teams lacking scale and lacking experience with the hyperscale requirements.”

While they might initially seem inverted in many senses (eastern vs western expansion across the Atlantic and targeting mature vs underserved markets), both Yondr Group and CyrusOne are fundamentally tackling the same challenges in order to take advantage of the same opportunities. Both aim to capitalise on the booming hyperscale market, harness economies of scale to overcome rising costs, and believe that the tide of global demand will continue to rise – at home and abroad and in mature and emerging markets. datacentremagazine.com

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VERNE GLOBAL

UNLIMITED

POTENTIAL, BACKED BY THE

PLANET WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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VERNE GLOBAL

By leveraging the natural powers of the planet, Verne Global offers high intensity, low cost compute that doesn’t cost the Earth

T

he saying ‘location is everything’ has never been more suitable.

Iceland is especially well placed to supercharge high intensity compute and meet the increasing demands of today’s and tomorrow’s data centres requirements.

Advantageously situated near Keflavik, Iceland, with its 40-acre data centre campus Verne Global has created the perfect environment to help both the planet and its people thrive. “The land of fire and ice” delivers on two critical aspects for data centres, cooling and power, in the form of its abundant renewable energy and perennially temperate climate. Today, Iceland’s grid is powered completely by renewable sources.

Geothermal and hydroelectric are highly stable sources of renewable energy. This stability also translates into predictable, long term pricing for Verne Global and its customers.

Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne Global, sums it up nicely, “At Verne Global, we are able to provide enough natural differentiation between us and our competitors because of the sustainable power availability, that is driven by 100% renewable energy from geothermal and hydroelectric power, and the natural climate, which enables us to provide the lowest cost, most stable and efficient power equation for our customers to run their high intensity and high performance compute from our campus in Iceland.”

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Unlimited Potential, Backed by the Planet

“These two sources are renewable, stable and predictable, they don’t experience the fluctuations of solar, wind, or other renewable sources, and they come with considerably higher efficiency attached to them. This gives the data centre operators located in Iceland, such as Verne Global, a huge cost and efficiency advantage, which we're able to pass on to our customers.

And we're able to do that with natural, renewable power and the lowest possible environmental impact.”

“The contracts that we have with our power companies enable us to provide power pricing to our customers ten years into the future at a fixed price. And that is not just unusual; it is unheard of and actually impossible anywhere else,” explains Ward.

He continues, “In certain countries, you can fix the price looking ahead for a couple of years, but in Iceland, as a result of the stable energy sources, you are able to have this fixed pricing availability. Furthermore, 54

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“ We do stand in a fantastic position, frankly, a unique position, being able to provide our customers with 100% renewable power generation capability that they are now seeking more than ever” DOMINIC WARD CEO, VERNE GLOBAL

the cost is the lowest that you can find even in other Nordic locations for the distribution of power that has been made available to us. So we have this competitive advantage on power costs, which is fundamental as to why our customers decide to choose us to provide them with data centre services.

We're able to give them the predictability over a decade if they want it. ”

VERNE GLOBAL

DOMINIC WARD TITLE: CEO INDUSTRY: INFO TECH & SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: LONDON Dominic has been involved with technology and digital infrastructure companies for most of his career. He joined the management team in 2015 but has been involved with the company for over ten years. He previously ran direct investments at the Wellcome Trust, one of our shareholders, where he was responsible for a substantial portfolio of private equity investments, including Verne Global. He began his career at Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Finance and later co-founded Lepe Partners, a technology investment and advisory firm.

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Corporate Responsibility, and the Cloud In the land of fire and ice, Intel and Verne Global have partnered to provide clients with sustainable, high-intensity computing

Intel and Verne Global: Sustainable, HighIntensity Computing In Keflavik, Iceland, Intel, and Verne Global aim to advance the future of highperformance computing (HPC). ‘One of Intel’s key goals is for us to be using 100% renewable energy by 2030’, Chris Feltham, Technical Sales at Intel, says. ‘Artificial intelligence has the power to do a lot of good. But it’s extremely computationally intensive. By running their intense workloads with renewable energy, companies can do good while protecting the planet’.

The Tech Intel’s vision is to build the right combination of technologies for each client. Its latest, 3rd-gen Xeon Scalable processors will power the next generation of supercomputers, delivering scale and performance for compute, storage, memory, network, and security. ‘Our

hardware is impressive. Combined with our software, it’s completely unique’, Chris says. ‘That’s where the real magic starts to happen’.

The Partnership High-intensity workloads consume huge amounts of energy—but Verne Global’s Iceland centre will combine Intel’s tech with Verne’s renewable operating model. ‘We can take these intense workloads and bring them to a location where we’re guaranteed renewable energy’, Chris says. ‘If the planet is something you care about, we help you operate with a clear conscience’.

The Future Going forward, Intel will continue to combine its tech with Verne Global’s agility. ‘Their operations are nimble’, Chris says. ‘They’ve got a will to adopt fast’.

As for the future? He sees no such end in sight. ‘As long as we can continue to help our clients operate more sustainably’, he concludes, ‘Intel and Verne Global will continue to collaborate’.

Learn more © Intel Corporation

VERNE GLOBAL

TATE CANTRELL TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: INFO TECH & SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: RESTON

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Tate has been responsible for the technical direction of the company since day one. He oversees all aspects of design and construction and is responsible for operational and security strategies. A seasoned industry speaker, Tate is an expert in data high-density data centre environments and works hand-in-hand with customers to ensure all their specialist technical needs are met. He started his career in data centre development and operations at Dupont Fabros Technology in 2003, where he rose through the ranks to be VP of Technology.

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VERNE GLOBAL

“As a result, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can be reduced significantly because of that certainty, because of the ability to look longer-term. And that's really important for the type of customers that we cater to and the type of products and services that we're able to provide to them, whether they are focused on financial services, engineering, research or any other industry.

Besides the abundance of low-cost renewable energy available in Iceland, located on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the country also helps to deliver on the necessary cooling required for data centre hardware — again, playing into Verne Global’s ability to lower the TCO for its customers.

“Because there's also a naturally stable temperature in Iceland that doesn't get too hot or too cold, with our ability to engineer and take advantage of that efficiency, we're able to achieve significant cost savings on our capital expenditure that then results in lower operating expenses for our customers in the short, medium and long-term. This means a significantly lower TCO, particularly for our customers who are able to think and act in the longer term,” says Ward.

The Power of Selective Partnerships Tate Cantrell, Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global, says, “One of the important aspects to the success of Verne Global and our ability to drive sustainability through the entire stack of high-performance computing is our effort to work closely with partners.

We're really excited with the advancements that we've been able to make, in particular with companies like Dell and NVIDIA, who are hardware partners that allow us to provide not only sustainable colocation services but the latest in high-performance hardware for our customers. Plus, because of the local partner ecosystem we have in Iceland, we're able to support any one of those provider’s hardware solutions all the way from the processing of an order datacentremagazine.com

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INTEGRA MISSION CRITICAL DESIGNS AND DELIVERS INDUSTRY-LEADING TURNKEY DATA CENTERS. Integra Mission Critical leverages our innovative designs and integrated approach, which have been honed over the past decade, and combine them with our relentless passion to mitigate risk, compress the schedule, reduce costs, and close the gap between capex and revenue generation. And we do it all for you as if we are building our own data center.

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Matt Koerner, Co-founder, and John Kolar, Principal at Integra MC talk about their strategic partnership with data centre innovator Verne Global Verne Global believes Iceland, home to its

40-acre data centre near Keflavik, is the best place in the world to locate high intensity computers. The available infrastructure allows it to power its data centre with 100% renewable energy, and its commitment to clean grid and stable climate drive it to select only the most exacting partners when building out new capacity.

Integra Mission Critical, co-founded by Matthew Koerner in 2015, typifies the level of excellence needed by Verne Global and the most demanding data centre users worldwide.

“From the outset we at Integra focused on solving some problems we saw in the industry such as skilled labour shortages. Figuring out how to implement change and get it globally accepted is a challenge we rise to every day!”

John Kolar heads Integra Mission Critical’s design, engineering and manufacturing functions from its Akron, Ohio factory. The partnership with Verne Global is based on shared values, he says. “We quickly found that their goals and their values matched our own very closely.”

Reusing existing buildings on Verne’s site, a former NATO airbase, built a cooling facility that beat ASHRAE recommended standards and a PUE better than level 1, without using any kind of mechanical refrigeration, at the same time saving cost and speeding up the schedule. The partners’ teams worked together as one, with Verne’s group providing local knowledge on-site, while Integra Mission Critical brought its specialised knowledge of the hyperscale data centre market, the equipment and how to bring resilience and flexibility into the future-proofed system design.

Matthew Koerner commented: “One thing that attracted us to Verne Global was their drive toward innovation and environmental sustainability. Integra Mission Critical is part of our Critical Project Services group of companies. Verne’s drive to innovation and sustainability has really exercised all of those companies within our portfolio: and its participation in innovation has truly made this an outstanding partnership.”

Learn More

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to the installation within our high-density colocation environments, through to the operations of that infrastructure and ensuring that our customers can manage that equipment effectively, wherever they are in the world.”

Verne Global believes in working hand-in-hand with its carefully selected partners to ensure excellent customer success. Ward underscores the importance of partner selection. “We have long standing relationships with a fantastic number of partners, but we're very careful about selecting those partners. It's essential for us to get that right. We work with customers who are harnessing advanced technology, and we, therefore, have

“The contracts that we have with our power companies enable us to provide power pricing to our customers ten years into the future at a fixed price. And that is not just unusual, It is unheard of and actually impossible anywhere else” DOMINIC WARD

CEO, VERNE GLOBAL

to be very selective because they'll be supporting our customers as closely as we are. Most importantly, we expect our partners to provide the same level of support to our customers — we see them almost as an extension of our service, and vice versa.”

Dell: Delivering Competitive Advantage In providing colocation services, Verne Global believes it’s essential to allow customers to be creative and help them achieve whatever it is they would like to achieve. “And so we like to choose partners datacentremagazine.com

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“ We're really excited with the advancements that we've been able to make, in particular with companies like Dell and NVIDIA, who are hardware partners that allow us to provide not only sustainable colocation services but the latest in high-performance hardware for our customers” TATE CANTRELL CIO, VERNE GLOBAL

partnerships, we are enabling our customers to be at the forefront of the competitive landscape and to maximise their returns.” that allow our customers to be creative and be flexible. An example of that would be working with Dell,” says Tate.

He continues, “Dell is often one of the first OEM providers to take on new products. For example, we had a customer who is at the forefront of using GPU's to power the latest in financial services applications. And this customer wanted to be the first in Europe to take advantage of the new A100 chipsets that NVIDIA released over the last year. And Dell was one of the first OEMs that was able to provide a solution to them, and it came months earlier than some of the other products that were next available in the market.

“That's really important for our customers.

They're focused on high-intensity computing, and they're focused on it because having a competitive edge in their industry is what allows them to have an increased turnover and increased productivity. And so, through our

NVIDIA: High-Intensity Computing of the Highest Level Verne Global’s partnership with NVIDIA is yet another differentiator that provides its clients with a competitive advantage.

Verne Global was the first data centre in Europe to be approved to house NVIDIA’s DGX product, a line of servers and workstations specialised in using GPGPUs to advance deep learning applications. Tate puts it more simply, “DGX is NVIDIA compressing all of its technology into a single box that's super high intensity.

“You talk about high-intensity computing.

This is the epitome of that,” Tate claims.

However, putting that much horsepower into a single box means that it’s not just any data centre that has the ability to provide the environmental conditions necessary to be able to run the equipment. datacentremagazine.com

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High intensity compute that’s customisable, scalable and sustainable Dell Technologies is on a mission to make high intensity compute accessible to organisations of all sizes, so everyone can push the boundaries of innovation.

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High intensity compute as-a-Service

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VERNE GLOBAL

That opened the door for Verne Global to provide what others couldn’t. Tate explains, “And so, establishing ourselves as a leader in technology innovation allowed NVIDIA to partner with us and allowed us to become a viable location where NVIDIA’s customers can deploy its DGX equipment. And not only a viable location, but one that can fuel the compute with 100% sustainable power.”

Ward jumps in to emphasise the point, “This is a really perfect example of what sets us apart because the horsepower behind this box makes it very different from a lot of other servers that you might see in a data centre.

It is effectively what would be regarded as a supercomputer in one small box, around

25cm high. It draws a huge amount of power, and because it's so dense, highly capable and in such a small form, there are only a few data centres in the world that are capable of housing even just a few of these.”

High density, high-performance computing requires the right infrastructure, which is exactly what Verne Global has done, designing the necessary environment from the ground up to ensure it can cater for all its customers’ needs and scale their compute on demand.

Its capability to handle high density compute capability at scale is what secured Verne Global its preferred partner status with NVIDIA. Intel: Bringing Forward-Looking Intelligence Over the course of the last two decades or so, Intel has found its way into most computers.

Although, as of late, the company has begun seeing increasing competition, it very much remains highly dominant in the industry, and as such, makes for an integral partner and valued trusted advisor. “Intel caters to the vast majority of server chip technology and architecture that sits inside most data centres’ compute capability. As a result, we naturally have a very close relationship with the company because so much of that hardware datacentremagazine.com

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also sits in our own data centre,” said Ward.

“Intel is very interested in the movement and the trends of high-intensity computing.

We work closely together with Intel to provide solutions to a number of large customers.”

This leads us nicely into Verne Global’s ability to cater for new technology as it develops. As Ward explains, “We certainly see a huge prevalence of new hardware in our data centre that is GPU, the dominance there naturally being NVIDIA, but we have the ability to provide infrastructure for any new hardware that might appear going forward − at really significant densities. And so, whether that be FPGAs or ASIC devices, or newer technologies that are focused on AI and machine learning and AI chips, for example, they will inevitably be dense and power-hungry. And there are certainly some that are just starting to

The future of data centers is Iceland For today’s data centers, location is everything.

By choosing Iceland, you can combine performance and stability with the most sustainable data center hub possible.

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The Data Centre Challenge: Optimising for Future Growth Looking forward, high-density data centres will be critical. To support the next-generation cloud, enterprise, and IT infrastructure for high-performance computing, data centres of the future mustbe built for purpose and sustainability while optimising footprint and costs for organisations.

Ward highlights the need for the data centre industry to plan and perhaps, to re-engineer to meet the oncoming challenges.

“One of the major challenges that we face broadly as an industry is looking forward to the enormous growth that has been created by this explosion in compute requirements.

That's putting huge amounts of pressure on power capacity, particularly in cities and other metropolitan areas where you've got immense amounts of congestion from data centres.

“Looking forward over the course of the next decade, the power equation for data centres is definitely going to be a challenge in certain cities.

We've certainly seen cities suffering, such as in Dublin and Frankfurt, where power availability has come up against supply constraints. At the same time, we're seeing huge growth in compute requirements, and therefore power requirements, from data centre usage. It is a real challenge for the industry. And I think it’s one that Iceland and Verne Global can help solve.”

How do you solve that challenge?

“Not all compute needs to sit in those metropolitan, congested locations.

Applications and compute hardware are not homogenous. Hardware is specifically chosen to run a certain type of application to maximise performance, efficiency and cost. However, very little attention has been paid to the infrastructure on which the hardware, and by virtue of this, the applications rely. So we must look at the evolution, or perhaps some would call it a revolution, that's being driven by the adoption of cloud, that has proven that applications can be made more efficient by optimising their environment and the infrastructure upon which they rely.”

“One of the greatest challenges that we face as an industry going forward is desegregating those applications and thinking about where applications should sit in the world most effectively and most efficiently for both the applications and the end-user. That's why at Verne Global, we've seen a huge number of our customers focusing on high or high-performance compute and taking advantage of the efficiency of our infrastructure that was built for purpose; infrastructure built from the ground up to serve that kind of need.” datacentremagazine.com

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appear on the market more recently, such as IPU technology. And we'll see plenty more appearing going forward into the next couple of years.

“Because we have the ability to provide for density and our data centre has been built from the ground up, it is a natural home for high density compute infrastructure even as it continues to develop. And as we see the use of machine learning starting to become prevalent across all industries, we are also going to recognise much more scope for these higher intensity and denser chip and server 70

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“ Through our partnerships, we are enabling our customers to be at the forefront of the competitive landscape to be able to maximise their returns” TATE CANTRELL CIO, VERNE GLOBAL

VERNE GLOBAL

types. And organisations will be looking for a home that can cater to that kind of density.

“At Verne Global, we are very much positioned for the future. We are certainly capable of looking forward and seeing what's coming; we know that we're able to cater for the higher density end of applications and the type of compute that is going to support that in the hardware that's coming down the line. But we're also − perhaps more importantly − able to cater for those other two major challenges organisations face. One of which is power availability, and Iceland has this massive

natural abundance of power, the vast majority of which arguably remains untapped, meaning it has huge amounts of scalability and is sustainable. And lastly, the world is finally starting to realise the importance of sustainability. We stand in a fantastic position, and frankly, a unique position, through being able to provide our customers with that 100% renewable generation capability that organisations are now seeking more than ever.”

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THE RISING TIDE OF

SUBMARINE

CABLING Industry experts discuss the role of interconnection hubs like Marseille in driving the next stage in the evolution of subsea cabling infrastructure.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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I

f data is the lifeblood of the digital age, then submarine cables are the veins and arteries that carry that blood throughout the vast, infinitely complex network that underpins almost every facet of modern life.

As new technologies like IoT, 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally change the ways in which data is generated and drive an exponential increase in the volume of data moving around the world on a daily basis, the submarine cabling infrastructure that supports the movement and distribution

NETWORKING

Rick Perry, Head of Subsea Partnerships, Vodafone Carrier Services

Sami Slim, Deputy Director, Telehouse France

of that data is also experiencing a generational shift.

Even during the past 18 months, the sharp uptick in global internet traffic thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this shift even further.

According to Sami Slim, Deputy Director of Telehouse France, “The emergence of bandwidth-intensive applications and the deployment of dense network infrastructure has increased the demand for capacity and more localised interconnection hubs.”

Marseille, France

Enterprises seeking to locate content as close as possible to end-users in order to reduce strain on their networks and improve performance are “a driving force for both submarine cable and data centre infrastructure,” something which Slim adds has resulted in a “sharp acceleration of submarine cable deployments due to traffic increase during the pandemic.”

Rick Perry, Head of Subsea Partnerships at Vodafone Carrier Services, agrees with Slim that the demands placed upon cabling infrastructure have increased in response datacentremagazine.com

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NETWORKING

“ Hyperscalers have become huge players in the subsea cable market” SAMI SLIM

DEPUTY DIRECTOR, TELEHOUSE FRANCE

to “huge growth in demand within the economic criteria required by the industry.”

Perry adds, however, that in addition to rapid expansion, the industry has also been experiencing an internal shift. “The initiation of new systems was historically driven by carriers using a consortium investment model,” he explains. “Now it is the hyperscale companies such as Facebook and Google who are initiating the majority of the new systems, sometimes funding themselves or joining with a small number of Telcos to meet any regulatory requirements.”

“Hyperscalers have become huge players in the subsea cable market,” Slim confirms,

adding that for colocation providers like Telehouse, “The advantage of partnerships with hyperscalers is that they can aggregate demand and commit on capacity.”

Because of the growth of hyperscale data centre and cloud companies into the subsea cabling market, Perry continues, “the development and architecture of hyperscale networks will increasingly dictate the future demand for international connectivity and therefore the deployment of submarine cables.” This shift is having a pronounced effect, not only on how but where submarine cables are built.

Location, Location, Location Both Vodafone Carrier Services and Telehouse are involved - along with a veritable rogues gallery of hyperscalers, datacentremagazine.com

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“We also need to ensure there is enough internet capacity to not only get people online but to help build a modern digital society” RICK PERRY,

HEAD OF SUBSEA PARTNERSHIPS, VODAFONE CARRIER SERVICES

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NETWORKING

cabling consortiums, and telecoms including China Mobile, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, and Telecom Egypt - are involved with the ongoing construction of the 2Africa submarine cable. Stretching for 37,000km from southern Europe all the way around the African continent, 2Africa is the most comprehensive and ambitious cabling project to serve the MEA region in history.

Perry explains that the project will be instrumental in supporting the ongoing digital revolution across the continent.

“Currently, 39% of Africa is connected to the internet, lagging behind the global average of 59%. Growing this figure is important, with the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development in 2019 estimating that a broadband expansion of 10% would yield a 2.5% increase in GDP per capita,” he

explains. “We also need to ensure there is enough internet capacity to not only get people online but to help build a modern digital society that includes services that require a large amount of data transfer, such as cloud computing or video. This is crucial for people, local businesses and multinational companies looking to operate in Africa.”

The project, he continues, will mean drastically improved internet capacity, speed, and availability for businesses and consumers across Africa, underpinning the rollout of 4G and 5G networks, which in turn will have a positive impact on communities, improve sectors such as healthcare and education, and build a more inclusive global digital society. A core goal of the 2Africa project, Perry continues, is “to ensure datacentremagazine.com

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NETWORKING

“ The development and architecture of hyperscale networks will increasingly dictate the future demand for international connectivity and therefore the deployment of submarine cables” RICK PERRY

HEAD OF SUBSEA PARTNERSHIPS, VODAFONE CARRIER SERVICES

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that access costs are better priced than traditional costs to interconnect submarine systems in Africa.” As a result, the system will terminate in carrier-neutral data centres in each country. “Where such data centres don’t exist, we are working with partners to develop them,” Perry notes.

One of the locations that is expected to be pivotal to the goal of harnessing the potential of the 2Africa cable isn’t actually in Africa but located several hundred miles across the Mediterranean in the south of France.

Interconnection in Marseille As African countries become increasingly connected to the digital world beyond the continent, Slim explains that transmitting data in and out of the region is going to be critically reliant on terrestrial information exchange hubs like Marseille. With a robust

NETWORKING

terrestrial cable network, 15 subsea cables currently landing in Marseille and more than 154 Tbps of bandwidth, the city is a key hub of international connectivity and is Europe’s gateway to Africa, Middle East, Asia, and Americas, explains Slim. It’s for this reason that Telehouse’s strategy for supporting and capitalising on the growth of major submarine cabling projects (including 2Africa) centres on a new point of presence in the city.

“The rise of Marseille in the interconnection market has been exceptional…. Submarine cable capacity arriving in Marseille is also increasing with new submarine cables (2Africa and PEACE) and more capacity on existing cables,” Slim explains, adding that in both Africa and Europe, potential hurdles for massive submarine cabling projects lie not beneath

the waves but on land. “The main issue for the city right now is the lack of diversity in terms of data centre supply. That is precisely what Telehouse is looking to solve. Establishing a data centre capacity in Marseille is a crucial step in Telehouse’s growth strategy,” he adds. “Our aim is to provide submarine consortiums with data centres as building blocks for their infrastructure and a facilitator for their go-to-market in each region. In each city we establish, we share our knowledge of the local environment and the main terrestrial routes to make it easier for our customers willing to open new points of presence in cities such as Marseille. We also think that our strength in the European Tier 1 hubs can help bridge the gap between submarine routes and terrestrial routes that are vital to delivering capacity to a wider market.” datacentremagazine.com

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Iron Mountain Data Centers and Web Werks Data Centers: GROWING TOGETHER WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Inside Iron Mountain Data Centers and Web Werks Data Centers’ US$150mn joint venture to capitalise on India’s data centre boom

I

Michael Goh, General Manager, APAC, Iron Mountain Data Centers Nikhil Rathi, Founder, Director & CEO, Web Werks Data Centers

ndia is home to just over 1.3 billion people and is rapidly closing the gap with the global population leader, China.

As the country’s population continues to grow, India’s digital economy is on the cusp of a boom, the likes of which have never been seen before.

“Right now, there are only about 700mn Indians online,” says Nikhil Rathi, Founder, Director, and CEO of Indian Tier-III data centre operator Web Werks. “With only about half of the whole country connected to the internet, as the other half comes online, just imagine the data consumption.” Rathi paints a picture of a digital India consuming more data than any other country in the world, as everything from streaming video content to advanced analytics is adopted at record speeds. “All of those things are going to require compute infrastructure that doesn't exist yet,” Rathi adds.

At this moment, the entirety of India’s data centre industry comprises approximately 400 MW of capacity. “That's less than Singapore, London - it's less than a quarter of the capacity in Northern Virginia alone,” says Michael Goh, the General Manager for APAC operations at Iron Mountain Data Centers. “Given the size of the population, how young they are, and how much they're embracing digital services, that capacity is going to boom.”

In the context of this pivotal moment in Indian history - the threshold of the country’s dawn as a digital superpower with the potential to go head to head with China and datacentremagazine.com

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Mead Rusert, President, describes its industryleading approach and the standard of excellence underpinning its partnership with Iron Mountain Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Kennesaw, Georgia, Automated Logic (a Carrier company) is an expert in the manufacture of building management systems (BMS) for data centres. Regarding the latter Mead Rusert, President, says, “Data centres have been part of our DNA since we launched a mission-critical division over 20 years ago.

We combine our powerful building automation products with a dedicated execution team to deploy our data centre solutions more efficiently around the world.

At Automated Logic, we like to say that we make buildings better.”

The company’s reputation for speed and reliability is partly rooted in the

outstanding quality of its products. Automated Logic’s WebCTRL® building automation system, for instance, provides customers with a seamlessly integrated building system, incorporating air conditioning, heating, ventilation, electrical power management, and more – to create a sustainable data centre solution. As such, the company is able to provide facilities staff with a ‘single pane of glass’ to monitor and manage operations. “Our Strategic Accounts team partners with the client to create standards for their data centres, which leads to a consistency of design and deployment around the world.”

It was this standard of excellence that secured the company’s partnership with data management company Iron Mountain, a collaboration that has now been ongoing for several years. “We’ve now earned the privilege of being the primary BMS provider across

its portfolio, of which we’re very proud,” states Rusert.

“The keys to success have really been to understand their processes: finding out what’s important to them as the client, incorporating that into the design, and then delivering a powerful, sustainable BMS using our single deployment model around the globe.”

The result for Iron Mountain has been the optimisation of its data centre processes to create efficient and harmonious operations irrespective of location.

“We’re very happy that Iron Mountain chose us as a partner. We want to instil the confidence that we can be the best BMS supplier and help with all its data centres going forward.”

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IRON MOUNTAIN:

1951

Year Founded

20,000

Number of Employees

Data Centres Industry

US$4.2bn

Global Iron Mountain corp revenue

“ Given the size of the population, how young they are, and how much they're embracing digital services, Indian capacity is going to boom” MICHAEL GOH,

GENERAL MANAGER, APAC, IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS

the US - Iron Mountain and Web Werks have come together in a historic undertaking that seems fitting for these noteworthy times.

In February of 2021, Iron Mountain announced plans to invest $150mn into 86

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a joint venture with Web Werks over the next two years as the two companies leverage their unique strengths in tandem in order to capitalise on India’s imminent data centre boom.

Iron Mountain: Security, Trust, and a Global Reach Since the early 1950s, Iron Mountain has been synonymous with security services you can trust. The Boston-based company spent its first 70 years safely storing physical data for companies throughout the US, as well as a number of government entities. Most famous for its hyper-secure facility built in a disused mine some 220 feet beneath rural Pennsylvania, Iron Mountain has leveraged its sterling reputation over the past decade into a successful transformation of its core competencies. Of course, you can still store a box of legal documents in an Iron Mountain facility but, more and more, the company’s key business has become building and managing the demand of its

IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS & WEB WERKS

MICHAEL GOH TITLE: GENERAL MANAGER, APAC COMPANY: IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS

EXECUTIVE BIO

customers' digital infrastructure needs.

Over the past few years, Iron Mountain Data Centers has built a substantial data centre platform in the US, where it operates sites from New Jersey to Phoenix, as well as across the Atlantic in London, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam.

“We are currently very strong and growing fast in America and Europe,” Goh explains, “and we want to do the same in Asia but even faster. We want a substantial global platform.” Goh, a data centre and telecoms veteran with two decades worth of experience, is based in Singapore - where Iron Mountain opened its first APAC facility in 2019. His previous success building extensive data centre platforms throughout the region is, he explains, exactly what Iron Mountain Data Centers has hired him to do. He explains that the reputation Iron Mountain established as a security-focused record management company is one of the keystones of their competitive advantage today. “We built up real customer trust over the 70 years that

Michael Goh is the Senior Director and General Manager for Iron Mountain’s data centre division for Asia. Prior to Iron Mountain, Michael spent 12 years at NTT Communications and last held a post of an Executive Director for Data Centre Services based in Singapore, where he successfully launched and grew NTT’s data centre business in Singapore.

Michael’s initial leadership roles were with NTT, where he led a team of product managers and sales specialists and helped launch and manage NTT’s Data Center, Cloud and domestic connectivity products. Michael graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Nanyang Technology University in Singapore.

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NIKHIL RATHI TITLE: FOUNDER, DIRECTOR & CEO COMPANY: WEB WERKS Nikhil is a serial tech entrepreneur and Founder & CEO of Web Werks, a global leader in data centres and cloud services. Web Werks Data Centers has been a leadrer in India for the past two decades. Acting as a business catalyst, Nikhil has mounted Web Werks on the global map, with six data centre locations in strategic cities with many marquee clients. Each of these large-scale data centres meet the market’s developing requirement for scalability, energy-efficient, highly interconnected, neutral facilities, so customers can have their critical infrastructure run nonstop. Web Werks partnered in 2021 with Iron Mountain Data Centers to enhance its presence throughout India and cater to a growing base of international customers.

“ We plan to expand into every major metro in India” NIKHIL RATHI,

we were a record storage company. Now, as we have pivoted over the last decade into the data centre industry, we're bringing that customer trust with us,” he says. “Our customers who trusted us for decades to store their physical data now trust us to do the same with their digital data.”

As a result of building a brand synonymous with reliability, Iron Mountain has amassed a global portfolio of more than 230,000 customers, which the company is leveraging as it sets its sights on the Indian data centre market. However, entering a market as large and complex as India isn’t something to be done lightly.

“Iron Mountain Data Centers has been looking for a way to enter the Indian market for the past three years. We know it's a complicated market. It's not a market that any foreign entity can just enter alone, and we've seen other international companies try to enter the market alone and fail,” Goh explains. This cautious approach is what led Iron Mountain Data Centers to partner up with Web Werks, he continues. “We needed a partner that understands the market, and has the local know-how to help us be successful, which led us to Web Werks,” he says, adding that

EXECUTIVE BIO

FOUNDER, DIRECTOR & CEO, WEB WERKS DATA CENTERS

IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS & WEB WERKS

the $150mn of capital investment Iron Mountain has made into the joint venture “really highlights our commitment to the partnership’s success.”

The joint venture with Web Werks isn’t the only area in which Iron Mountain is leveraging its key partnerships, Goh adds.

“Iron Mountain Data Centers have been working with ALC for many years. We deploy ALC across our portfolio and have been delighted with the product and support provided by ALC.''

THE JOINT VENTURE’S THREE FACILITIES SO FAR PUN-1 Located near Pune International Airport in the heart of India’s Maharashtra data centre belt, PUN-1 colocation facility is easily accessible and connectivity-rich.

Capacity: 2 MW Footprint: 38,000 sqft MUM-1 Located in the heart of one of the world’s fastest-growing data centre markets, MUM-1 offers low latency and the ability for customers to scale as they grow with a second 100.000 SQ FT, 12.5MW facility planned for 2022.

Capacity: 2 MW Footprint: 50,000 sqft NCR-1 Located 30 minutes from central New Delhi and Indira Gandhi International Airport, NCR-1 is easily accessible and connectivity-rich.

Capacity: 2.75 MW Footprint: 70,000 sqft

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Web Werks: Local Knowledge, Interconnection, and Harnessing the Ecosystem Web Werks was founded in a cramped bedroom in the earliest days of India’s access to the internet with a princely “funding round” of $30 to host a single web page. “There was only one ISP in the country at the time, which was state-owned, so there was basically no third-party hosting at all,” recalls Rathi. “But we steadily built portals, hosted services, and the data centre

“ Iron Mountain Data Centers have a long working relationship with i3 Solutions. As our trusted consultant in Asia and Europe, their expertise has helped us deliver multiple successful and timely projects for our customers” MICHAEL GOH,

GENERAL MANAGER APAC, IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS

IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS & WEB WERKS

Iron Mountain Data Centers - Global Portfolio

business actually grew out of the hosting group because at one point we were hosting around 5,000 resellers and around 85,000 websites worldwide.”

Today, Web Werks has grown into one of India’s most trusted colocation providers. “We started with a very small setup that grew into the three facilities we have today - one in Navi Mumbai, one in Pune, and one in Delhi NCR,” Rathi says. “When Web Werks mushroomed from one small facility to three Tier-III data centres today, it laid the foundation for the Indian market which, in combination with the solid global platform that Iron Mountain Data Centers has built in Europe, Singapore, and the US, has a lot of potential.”

Rathi explains that, by combining Web Werks’ extensive knowledge and understanding of the Indian data centre market, as well as its position as an established local brand with a huge ecosystem of partners and customers, with the globalised design standards, datacentremagazine.com

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“ What we haven’t been able to do so far is cater to the hyperscale market, and that's what Iron Mountain is going to help us to do” NIKHIL RATHI,

FOUNDER, DIRECTOR & CEO, WEB WERKS DATA CENTERS

brand recognition, consumer trust, and capital that Iron Mountain Data Centers brings to the table, the joint venture is set to rapidly expand throughout both the Indian colocation industry and into the country’s hyperscale market. Web Werks Data Centers hosts more than 180 ISPs in its Navi Mumbai facility alone, as well as three major internet exchanges, OTT and CBS players both from India and

overseas - bringing a dense carrier neutral interconnection ecosystem to the table.

“What we haven't been able to do so far is cater to the hyperscale market, and that's what Iron Mountain is going to help us to do. It's the last missing piece of the puzzle,” Rathi adds.

In addition to leveraging one another’s strengths, Iron MountainIron Mountain Data Centers and Web Werks are also trading on their extensive networks of existing partners and suppliers. Based in Kennesaw, Georgia, US building automation system manufacturer Automated Logic is Iron MountainIron Mountain Data Centers’s’ key strategic supplier of building management systems (BMS) solutions. “Automated Logic is the BMS system which we use in many of our facilities and is one of the preferred platform providers we use worldwide,” explains Goh. “Automated Logic helped us to migrate the existing BMS system to a new system with less impact. Additionally, Automated Logic is able to connect to third party monitoring points which really datacentremagazine.com

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saves us a lot of cost for the electrical power monitoring system.” By applying Automated Logic’s BMS solution, he continues, Iron Mountain is able to “expand in a consistent manner,” by unifying the experience for both its employees and customers.

Now, Automated Logic is supplying the Iron MountainIron Mountain Data Centers Web Werks joint venture with construction, installation, and operational services. “On the construction-front, Automated Logic provides the BMS software and hardware we need. For the installation process, Automated Logic appoints local companies as partners to do the local installation on the ground. And, when everything is up and running, they provide operations support in the form of a BMS Control and Monitoring System, COLO View for customers to monitor the temperature and humidity, and power monitoring for the individual server racks,” Goh explains, adding that the unified platform Automated Logic provides across all of Iron MountainIron Mountain Data Centers’s’ global operations “also means that our technicians, engineers and NOC staff are familiar with the tools at their disposal, regardless of their location, thus enabling us to tap into our global resources and expertise wherever and whenever it’s needed.”

Pan-Indian Expansion “Web Werks has this huge ambition to grow, and so does Iron Mountain Data Centers.

Our outlooks and philosophies are very closely aligned,” Goh continues. Since its announcement in February, the joint venture has bought a 100,000 square foot land parcel adjacent to Web Werks Data Centers’ existing MUM-1 facility and - much like the country’s digital economy - is poised for an explosion of activity.

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“We plan to expand into every major metro in India. We're looking at Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, to offer even more to the ecosystems we already serve,” says Rathi, casting his eyes ahead to a growing tidal wave of demand on the horizon. “India used to pull all its data from the US and other foreign countries. Now, there's content being made and stored here and more data than ever being imported. All that content has to be hosted in India,” he says. “To be ready for this datanami, we have teams in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad getting everything ready for our expansion into those markets as well. The demand is out there, and we should follow.”

Goh agrees. “It's also no secret that we want to bring new customers into our business and help them succeed. So, bringing more customers to India from our global base and building more data centres in India are

IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS & WEB WERKS

“Our customers who trusted us for decades to store their physical data now trust us to do the same with their digital data” MICHAEL GOH,

GENERAL MANAGER, APAC, IRON MOUNTAIN DATA CENTERS

our two key goals for the next year and a half,” he says, adding that the first Iron Mountain customer had already been onboarded into one of the joint venture’s Indian facilities.

Rathi also notes that, much like the tide of data flowing in and out of Indian servers, the movement of Iron Mountain’s customers into the joint venture’s facilities isn’t just a one-way street. “The future of this partnership also allows Web Werks' customers to grow into Iron Mountain's facilities. We've had a number of conversations already with our Indian customers who want to grow into Iron Mountain's US and European data centres,” he says excitedly.

The next 18 months will be full of exciting new developments as the joint venture begins to build at scale with speed.

Rathi states that “’one of the first next milestones is to get the MUM-2 facility

expansion of 12.5MW up and running,” which is something he’s confident that the partnership between Web Werks and Iron Mountain Data Centers can accomplish.

“We were looking for an excellent partner to help us evolve to our next stage of growth, and there's no better partner than a trusted name like Iron Mountain Data Centers,” he says. “That combination is what we intend to leverage to start catering to hyperscale, enterprise and retail customers as the Indian data centre market booms.”

Iron Mountain:

Web Werks:

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PUSHING

the limits of data centre efficiency WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

As data centre PUE scores get lower, designers are fighting harder for smaller gains.

D Darren Watkins, Managing Director, VIRTUS Data Centres

Brian Johnson, Data Centre Segment Head, ABB 96

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ata centre power usage effectiveness (PUE) scores have remained relatively stagnant for the past decade, as diminishing returns make it harder and harder to squeeze more efficiency out of a facility.

Back in 2008, Google’s earliest hyperscale facilities were running at average PUEs of around 1.21 more than a decade ago.

Microsoft was hitting PUE scores of 1.22 that same year. In 2021, Google’s global data centre footprint regularly hits annual average PUEs of 1.1, with its hyperscale facility in Quilicura, Chile, reporting an annual PUE for the past 12 months of 1.08 - meaning that virtually all but a fraction of the power consumed by those sites was being used power IT equipment, as opposed to lighting, cooling, and security systems.

Those figures are well below the current Uptime Institute’s estimated industry average of 1.58, even though that average itself hads fallen from 1.8 several years ago. However, as data centre operators (hyperscalers in particular) start to push their designs to the very limits of what can

TECHNOLOGY

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BRIAN JOHNSON

DATA CENTRE SEGMENT HEAD, ABB

“ Strides have been made, and the sector has laid the groundwork to continue on a greener growth path” BRIAN JOHNSON

DATA CENTRE SEGMENT HEAD, ABB

physically be achieved in terms of efficiency, the trends that drove them to these lengths - essentially cost, sustainability, and the rising densities and power demands of modern chips - where can they possibly go from here?

“Data centres are navigating a period of conflicting demand. On one hand, the race to net- zero carbon emissions is intensifying, while on the other hand, we are seeing a rapid digital acceleration, the vast proliferation of smart devices and an

upward surge in data demand,” explains Brian Johnson, Data Centre Segment Head at Swedish-Swiss power, electronics, automation, and robotics conglomerate ABB. He explains that, even as data centres eke every last drop of efficiency they can from their designs in the name of both cost efficiency and compliance with sustainability goals, the demand isn’t going anywhere but up.

“The total installed base of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices worldwide is projected to amount to 30.9bn units by 2025, a sharp jump from the 13.8bn units that are expected in 2021,” Johnson notes.

And that’s just one sector. Across the board, trends ranging from the growing adoption of 5G, the remote work revolution brought on

by COVID-19, the digitalisation of emerging datacentremagazine.com

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TECHNOLOGY markets and the subsequent growth of the edge, as well as increased adoption of high workload intensity technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), are all eating into efficiency gains that have nowhere left to go.

To illustrate “just how energy- efficient data processing has become, imagine that if the airline industry was able to demonstrate the same level of efficiency, a typical 747 passenger plane would be able to fly from New York to London on just 2.8 litres of fuel in around eight minutes,” says Johnson.

And yet, the need for more sustainable design, both in terms of PUE and water usage effectiveness (WUE) - an area where hyperscalers, in particular, have been increasingly criticised for their monumental

Water: the not-so-hidden cost of data centre cooling Q. How are innovations in the cooling space affecting the massive demand that data centres can have on the local water supply?

Darren Watkins: The cooling demands of hyperscale Data Centres tend to favour chilled water cooling systems, so the water impact is negligible. This is because once a system is operational, only limited amounts of make-up water are required.

Chilled water systems have significantly improved in terms of energy efficiency with the increase in ‘free-cooling’ capability, i.e. using ambient outside temperatures for cooling.

At VIRTUS, we have been concerned about water usage for a long time and have addressed this with some recent 100

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innovative design changes. If you don’t have access to an aquifer and instead are using mains supplied water, then this is a major challenge. We have reverted to the HVAC systems in areas where water is a concern or where that technology is more appropriate. The customer usage of the facilities that we provide is a key element in how efficient the data centre is.

We provide the most efficient PUE environment, but if the customer deploys in a way that degrades the performance, then investments in plant technology are almost wasted. VIRTUS invests a great deal of time monitoring and insisting that our customers follow strict guidelines on deployment containment to ensure the absolute best performance is achieved from the design.

TECHNOLOGY

consumption and the subsequent impact on local water reserves in drought-stricken regions like the American Southeast, and increased capacity continues to grow.

Data centre operators need to find ever more innovative ways to be efficient at the bleeding edge.

VIRTUS Data Centres: Power, Cooling, and Water We caught up with Darren Watkins, managing director for VIRTUS Data Centres, to get more insight into how operators can holistically approach the goals of lowering energy and water consumption in an increasingly datadense world. “Power and cooling account for much of the operating costs of a

data centre, and as such, they are a crucial consideration for efficiency and performance. However, whilst a laser focus on sustainability is absolutely key to the future of the data centre industry, it is not new,” he explains. “For a long time, we have recognised the need to produce more efficient data centres with lower and lower PUE and WUE designs.”

Based in the UK, VIRTUS owns and operates 11 data centres across four campuses in the north and west of London - a footprint that currently comprises over 178 MW of power in over 77,000 square metres of data centre space. “We strive to produce a 1.0x PUE and achieve varying PUE’s across our estate,” says Watkins, adding that all of VIRTUS’ sites have datacentremagazine.com

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TECHNOLOGY

“ For a long time, we have recognised the need to produce more efficient data centres with lower and lower PUE and WUE designs” DARREN WATKINS,

MANAGING DIRECTOR, VIRTUS DATA CENTRES

managed to exceed industry averages.

Most new builds, he notes, fall “between 1.2x and 1.4x.”

Cooling is one of the areas where VIRTUS has been leading the UK market for a number of years. “We had our first liquidcooled customer racks back in 2015, but there are also key design elements with regards to air flow management, too,” says Watkins. VIRTUS has been operating its LONDON2 facility (certified to UTI Tier III) using exclusively indirect evaporative cooling technology since 2014. They were the first wholesale data centre in the UK to cool a data centre in this manner.

“This produces better PUE statistics in comparison to traditional HVAC systems,” says Watkins, who adds that VIRTUS is continually exploring new technologies that may produce even better results, including 102

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direct-to-chip liquid cooling, which he explains “can offer some of the lowest PUEs possible, as the temperature at which they operate means that no mechanical or adiabatic cooling would be required.”

Watkins also argues that more powerful technologies and their impact on power consumption may not have the direct causational effect that you’d initially expect. “More compute power may seem like it will result in significantly more power usage, but in fact, as it uses and produces higher temperatures, in practice this leads to greater efficiency - not only in PUE but also in other resources,” Watkins explains.

“Higher powered compute often uses greater intelligence in its software, so there is an opportunity to innovate further to lower the PUE even more. In the future, it may even mean that this kind of software

TECHNOLOGY

could enable the removal of generators or UPS systems completely.”

The Holistic Approach The fact that the data centre industry is, in more and more places, essentially maxing out its efficiency when it comes to PUE may not actually be a bad thing.

Obviously, lower PUE scores are better for the environment (not to mention everyone’s bottom line), but the loss of ultra-low PUE as a differentiator between data centres focused on sustainability may have the effect of pushing operators to look elsewhere for ways to outshine their peers in terms of efficiency and green innovations. Watkins explains that “We continue to innovate but also to broaden our view of the data centre with regards to sustainability, from the carbon

impact of the physical construction of the buildings, right through to how we use natural resources such as rainwater harvesting, aquifers to access natural water resources, and even living walls on the exterior of our data centres.”

Whether it’s embracing liquid cooling (using water or dielectric fluids), building aquifers, returning waste heat to the local utility grid, the industry’s near-exhaustion of PUE efficiency gains is pushing more and more operators to look at the bigger picture.

“The data centre market is no stranger to energy efficiency strategies, and in recent years has led by example in the missioncritical arena,” Johnson reflects. “Strides have been made, and the sector has laid the groundwork to continue on a greener growth path.” datacentremagazine.com

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INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

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INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

BRIDGING THE

TALENT GAP

IN A BOOMING INDUSTRY WRITTEN BY: LAURA GARCIA PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHN

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Julie M. Albright TITLE: BOARD OF DIRECTORS COMPANY: INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA Dr. Julie Albright is a Digital Sociologist, Author, and Lecturer in the departments of Applied Psychology and Engineering at the University of Southern California. Her research has focused on the growing intersection of technology and social / behavioral systems.

Dr. Albright is a sought after keynote speaker for her insights on technology and its social impacts, appearing as an expert on the Today Show, NBC Nightly News, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR Radio and many others.

Her book on the impacts of digital technologies on society - Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream is a Bloomberg Top 30 Book of the Year. Her next book focuses on our increasing reliance on digital infrastructure.

In addition, Dr. Albright sits on the board of directors of Infrastructure Masons and is the executive sponsor of iMason’s Education Initiatives, the topic of this month’s feature article.

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Julie M. Albright, PhD, iMasons Board Member and Executive Sponsor of iMasons Education Initiatives, on accelerating the flow of talent into the digital infrastructure industry

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hen members of the iMasons Advisory Council are asked, “What keeps you up at night?” the top responses always include how to source the talent needed to meet their planned growth and increasing the diversity of the people in the industry.

The people who built the physical and logical foundation of the internet are “greying out”, nearing retirement, and they are concerned about this loss of experience as the industry faces unprecedented growth. While these leaders are mostly white men, they recognise that the readiest source of talent to succeed them is women and people of other underrepresented groups. Increasing diversity is not only a practical way to ease the talent shortage, this diversity of experience and perspective is vital as we build the infrastructure to serve a global population. Plus, employment in the sector is another way that digital infrastructure can accelerate sustainable development worldwide - we can hire a diverse workforce to serve diverse communities.

In their 2021 report on job demand in the data centre industry, Uptime Institute reported that employment in the data centre infrastructure sector will increase from 2 million FTE in 2019 to 2.3 million FTE in 2025. This may not sound like a booming industry, but these figures don't include replacing people who leave their jobs, those who are “greying out.” datacentremagazine.com

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Digital Infrastructure Futures Foundation (DIFF) as a 501c3 charity to enable contributions from individuals to be taxdeductible. DIFF also qualifies for the employee giving programmes and company match of most major employers, accelerating investment in education programmes in our sector.

As an association of individuals, iMasons forms member committees to focus efforts on our key initiatives. Launched in 2018 and chaired by industry veteran Dennis Cronin, the Education Committee aims to bridge the talent gap by increasing the number and quality of the education and training programmes that deliver talent to our industry. The approach has been to identify existing programmes that specifically prepare people to enter and succeed in our industry, and provide scholarships to the students in and entering those programmes. iMasons has identified degree or certificate programmes at ten institutions worldwide that fit the bill, and awarded almost 50 scholarships for a total of almost US$122,000 in 2020. Just ahead, we will highlight some of these programmes, including IT Sligo in Ireland, HELHa in Belgium, and Southern Methodist University in Texas.

Of course, in order to give money, we must raise it. In 2018, iMasons launched a US$1 Million Dollar Challenge to fund scholarships.

With the incredible generosity of companies and individuals in our community, as of 2020, we are over halfway there. Due to this success, in 2020, iMasons founded the 108

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Coming Up We are often asked by Universities to assist in establishing data centre programmes. To address this need, in 2020, iMasons launched a Capstone project at Hampton University as a pilot.

Due to its success, the programme will now be expanding to three more universities throughout 2021 and 2022. Internships are another key strategy to bring new early career professional talent into companies in our industry, and many companies are seeing success there. CommScope and Vertiv both have excellent programmes that are profiled on the coming pages.

The above programmes focus primarily on university graduates, but we often hear that the skills shortage is most acute at the technician and trades levels. We’ll take a look at Microsoft’s programme to create and support Data Centre Academies to train skilled technicians in partnership with a dozen colleges that are in close perimeter to Microsoft data centres.

So, while our industry is growing at a breakneck pace, the industry is also working in partnership with the education sector to meet that need, and those efforts are quickly accelerating. Together, we can bridge the talent gap and make for a more vibrant tomorrow!

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Phillip Marangella TITLE: CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER

CAPSTONE MENTOR PROFILE

COMPANY: EDGECONNEX The HBCU Capstone project is an ideal initiative that ties directly to our commitment as a company to increasing diversity at EdgeConnex and in the data centre industry. I feel honoured to be one of the initiators of the project and privileged to serve as a mentor that helped provide the inaugural Capstone students at Hampton with guidance, best practices, and learnings throughout the entire project. To see the students evolve and become excited about data centres and consider this industry as a potential career path was extremely rewarding, highlighted by the fact that EdgeConneX itself hired two of the students, and two others also secured jobs within the industry. I can’t wait to grow and scale this Capstone programme to more schools, have many more students get involved and see more leaders from the industry take part and also become mentors so that we can train and recruit the next generation of leaders in digital infrastructure.

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Capstone Projects Deliver Fresh Engineers

By Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director, Infrastructure Masons took my undergraduate degree at Montana State, mostly for the skiing, truth be told.

I studied Industrial Engineering, which was perhaps an odd choice as Montana had little industry - at the time, Montana’s biggest export was college graduates. So, because there was little industry around, my senior “Capstone” project was synthetic. We were given a product (ours was an electronic alarm clock), and our assignment was to design, on paper, a manufacturing system to make them. It was an important experience, integrating much of what we’d studied: manufacturing processes, supply chain management, cost accounting, quality assurance, plant layout, etc. And it worked! A few months later, I was designing production systems for mainframe computers in Silicon Valley.

So, when iMasons wanted to introduce university students to the digital infrastructure industry, a Capstone Project seemed like a good approach. Phillip Marangella introduced us to Hampton University, a small HBCU in southern Virginia, and we were off and running.

The school of Engineering and Technology at Hampton includes Electrical and Computer Engineering and Architecture. We pitched the idea of doing a Capstone in digital infrastructure to the students, hoping at least one team would pick us. We were thrilled when two student teams of engineers and architects chose the iMasons project. Offering them scholarships may have influenced their decision.

In the first semester, the students were given a fictitious mobile phone app with given latency and bandwidth requirements and a user growth curve in the US market. Their assignment was to determine how many data centres, of what size, to put where, to serve

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that demand, considering population centres, access to power and fibre, natural hazards, etc.

In the second semester, they had to pick one of those locations and design the data centre: choose an actual site in that market, select the IT hardware, determine power requirements, cooling strategy, specify all the power and cooling equipment, layout the site and building, and develop CAPEX and OPEX budgets. As they worked on the project, the students met weekly with a team of iMasons mentors who answered questions, provided feedback, and introduced the students to professionals around the world who could answer questions they couldn’t. In this feature, you’ll hear from the mentors, Phillip Marangella, Chheng Lim and Bill Kleyman, about what it was like to get to know these students on that journey.

In April, the students presented their final designs to a panel of senior executives who datacentremagazine.com

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provided input, advice and encouragement.

We had executives from the hyperscalers, leading collocation providers and equipment manufacturers worldwide. I encourage readers to watch the video of the final presentations. The students did great!

The five architecture students were not graduating – they were all in the third or fourth year of a five-year masters degree. However, the seven engineers all graduated two weeks after the final presentation with a BSEE or BSCE. Two of the young ladies already had jobs lined up. Of the remaining five engineers, one went to graduate school, and three were hired into our industry. Our strategy seems to be working!

The 2020/21 project at Hampton was a pilot. The students learned a lot, and so did we. We are busy tuning up the programme for next year, and I’m very grateful to our primary mentors as each has agreed to be a “Lead Mentor” at a new school in the 2021/22 school year, and we are recruiting additional mentors 112

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to work with them. I’m very pleased that AFCOM has agreed to partner with iMasons to recruit mentors and support the student teams as the programme expands. Next year, we expect to have Capstone Projects at four minority-serving institutions in the US: • Hampton University • Morgan State University • University of Texas, El Paso • Prairie View A&M, University In our pilot year, we introduced a dozen university students to the digital infrastructure industry and hired at least three into the industry. This coming year it will be more like 30 or 40!

Supporting multidisciplinary Capstone projects is iMasons primary strategy to accelerate the flow of talent into our industry from universities, and we look forward to expanding beyond the US in coming years.

Join us!

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Bill Kleyman TITLE: SVP DIGITAL SOLUTIONS

CAPSTONE MENTOR PROFILE

COMPANY: SWITCH Growing up, I was so lucky to have excellent teachers and mentors in my life. There were always people at my school or my work with way more experience than I who would take the time to explain complex technology topics. They would make sure that I understood just how critical new solutions are and how they would impact my life. It’s that kind of inspiration that I was always hoping to give back to a younger generation. Looking back at the last couple of years, I quickly saw a growing reliance on digital infrastructure. However, I also saw a disconnect and a gap in how a younger generation understood technology and the wonderful things they could do with it.

To inspire the builders of the next digital age, I have been working with iMasons and the Education Committee to mentor and lecture students from HBCUs on the importance of digital architecture.

With many hours spent in the evenings helping design data centres, building networks, discussing applications, and applying what the students have learned throughout their courses, we mentors helped guide engineering and architectural majors better to understand digital infrastructure solutions.

This entire experience has been so special for me. I’m getting the chance to fulfil my dream of becoming a mentor and a teacher for the digital generation.

Along with other iMasons Mentors, my participation has already helped several of the students land data centre architecture or engineer roles. Driving diversity, inclusion, and equality, this iMasons programme ensures that our digital future is diverse and genuinely inspired. As supporters of iMasons, I am so proud of this work and am very excited to see this programme expand to more HBCUs across the country.

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SMU Master’s Degree in Datacenter Systems Engineering

By Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director, Infrastructure Masons allas is a hot market for data centres and is home to a number of leading data centre companies, including Aligned, Stream and Compass. To meet the growing demand for talent, the industry partnered with Dallas-based Southern Methodist University to create a Masters Degree in Datacenter Systems Engineering (DSE), the first such programme in the US. To ensure alignment with the industry’s needs, the programme maintains an industry advisory council, chaired by Eddie Schutter, CIO of Switch, and iMasons Board Member.

If an incoming student has a bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, or math, the DSE degree can be completed in an academic year and a half if taken full time.

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The courses can be taken in-person on the SMU campus or online remotely. There is no required hands-on lab component requiring on-campus attendance. “We typically have a cohort of about 20 students entering and graduating each year,” said Volkan Otugen, PhD, the DSE Programme Director. “They are typically about a 50/50 mix of US and international students. Surprisingly, the majority of our on-site students are international. They come to the US to obtain the degree and find a job in the US. The online students are mostly US-based, and most of them are already working in the industry.”

By selecting elective courses, students can specialise in one of the following four areas: • Facilities infrastructure and management • Data engineering, analytics • Networks, virtualisation, and security • Business datacentremagazine.com

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“ Preventing children from being digitally excluded from home education is a key priority and an invaluable way to inject the next generation of leaders with the tools they need to become tomorrow’s digital pioneers and thrive without constraints.”

LIZ RAVEN Yondr: Supporting Digital Inclusion - TechInclusionUK Author: Liz Raven, Head of Quality at Yondr Group and iMasons EMEA Millennials/GenZ MRG Lead ducation has become an increasingly polarising topic as the data centre industry faces a growing talent shortage and a lack of awareness of the opportunities available for young talent in this sector. We’ve been searching for opportunities to turn talk into action and truly make a difference.

A core value at Yondr is the ability to empower the next generation of talent and provide these young individuals easy access to the opportunities that exist within the data centre business, either through partnerships with colleges and vocational institutions, or by offering comprehensive internship programmes.

COVID-19 has brought to light one of the biggest challenges in our current society increased digital inequality. In a world that relies heavily on digital infrastructure, there is a growing concern about the impact of the pandemic on children who are homeschooled and often share one device in the entire household and, in the worst-case scenario, don’t have access to any form of technology at all.

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HEAD OF QUALITY AT YONDR GROUP AND IMASONS EMEA MILLENNIALS/GENZ MRG LEAD

In an effort to proactively overcome these challenges, Yondr Group wanted to tackle this issue differently by partnering with TechInclusionUK to provide computers to those who do not have access to devices that can help them benefit from an at-home education. TechInclusionUK has developed a hassle-free and secure process to put old tech to good use. Their proven platform refurbishes unwanted but working tech, such as laptops, desktops, and tablets, extending the products use-life and amortising the environmental impacts of their manufacture over a longer use-life.

The devices are then donated to schools and social organisations to allow young people in education to access the resources they need to have a chance of reaching their full potential.

For this partnership, Tower Hamlets, which has one of the highest rates of child poverty in London, was selected. Preventing children from being digitally excluded from home education is a key priority and an invaluable way to inject the next generation of leaders with the tools they need to become tomorrow’s digital pioneers and thrive without constraints.

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Chheng Lim TITLE: ASSOCIATE

CAPSTONE MENTOR PROFILE

COMPANY: SHEEHAN NAGLE HARTRAY ARCHITECTS When I first joined the mission-critical industry, most architects had never heard about data centre design or digital infrastructure. The industry is relatively foreign to many people despite the fact that it plays an essential role in our digital lives. In talking about data centres, we are sharing the story of how the internet is built - everything from broader utility infrastructures, to technology innovations, and to physical construction. I have been fascinated by this story, and I joined the iMasons Capstone project in order to share my knowledge with and inspire the next generation of architects and engineers to join our industry.

Throughout the course of the iMasons Capstone project, I was part of a 4-person mentor team that met regularly with two teams of students from Hampton University to discuss data centre design.

I also organised a biweekly focused architecture design review with the students in collaboration with other members from our office. All of this was conducted virtually in the programme’s inaugural year due to the COVID pandemic and required dedication from both the students and mentors. It was, therefore, deeply rewarding and meaningful to me to see the students present their final projects to a panel of tech executives and secure opportunities in the industry.

The project delivers substantial impact by actively equipping students with the unique skillset for digital infrastructure careers. We are introducing the students to a new world of opportunity, and the decision to do so at an HBCU speaks to iMason’s commitment to creating opportunities for all. I am excited to see the programme expand to additional universities, and encourage more leaders to share their wisdom and expertise on digital infrastructure. I am honoured to be part of this endeavour.

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Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters, on iMasons critical role in training the next workforce

By Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters Masons is playing a pivotal role in supporting educational programs that train the next generation of the data centre industry’s workforce. 30% of current data centre personnel are expected to “grey out” over the next few years, and 60% of data centre operators are concerned about an industry-wide skills shortage driven by that coming wave of retirements. It is critical for our industry to recruit more young people to look at data centre careers and to educate and train those young people with the multidisciplinary skills needed in our industry. iMasons, and its members, are passionate advocates for both of those critical issues.

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Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters

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iMasons’ involvement in the SMU’s pioneering degree programme – the M.S. in Data Center Systems Engineering – is a perfect example of the impact iMasons is having. This was the first degree programme in the U.S. that trains students for careers in data centres, and it has served as a model for similar programmes at other colleges and universities. iMasons has provided valuable input to the programme and has also generously created scholarships for students of need to enter these degree programmes. Those scholarships have recently allowed two students of colour to successfully completed their degrees and begin their careers at fast-growing data centre companies. Thank you to iMasons for their invaluable advocacy for these education programs.

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IT SLIGO AND HELHA DELIVERING DATA CENTRE FACILITIES ENGINEERS

Author: Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director at Infrastructure Masons T Sligo (Institute of Technology Sligo), in County Sligo on the north-west coast of Ireland, and Haute Ecole Louvain en Hainaut (HELHa) in Mons, Belgium, in partnership with Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have taken a global lead in public institution online training of data centre facilities engineers.

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IT Sligo BEng in Data Centre Facilities Engineering Data Centres are a big business in Ireland, and IT Sligo has risen to support the industry’s needs. IT Sligo began online training in 2002, and this focus has served the institution very well as IT Sligo now has about 5000 online learners this year, the largest cohort in Ireland. The school’s online Bachelor’s degree in Data Centre Facilities Engineering (EU Level 6) has also grown, and they regularly fill their 24 students per year cohort. “Most of our students now come from the firms providing support and services to the hyperscalers,” said Conor Lawlor, Course Coordinator for the DC Engineering programme.

Incoming students must have a Higher Certificate in a related technical field or have completed a Senior Trades Craft Apprenticeship and have five years’ experience. The degree is a one-year add-on but is taken part-time over two academic years. Lawlor continued, “Most of our students have full-time jobs, so they attend class two evenings a week, working from home. Each lecture is recorded, so the students don’t have to attend live if they so wish.” The high point of each year is the weeklong hands-on lab taught at HELHa. “We were initially worried that students would

be turned off about having to take the time and expense to travel to Belgium, but they really look forward to it,” continued Lawlor.

“The lab facilities at HELHa are really good, and it provides a very good opportunity to experience data centre technologies in a different European country.”

HELHa Masters in Data Centre Engineering HELHa offers an online “European Master’s” (EU Level 7) certificate/degree in Data Centre Engineering that is typically a twoyear programme but can be earned in one academic year if the student completed IT Sligo’s BEng programme. “Our students include both people from other sectors and industries who are upskilling to work in Data Centres, and also BEng students from IT Sligo and other schools who want to earn a Masters. Regardless of their background, this programme provides the Data Centre industry with staff who are qualified to provide in-depth skills necessary for the technical management and operation of data centre facilities,” commented Valérie Seront, Director of the School of Engineering at HELHa. “The tuition for this programme is 3500 €/year. iMasons scholarships allow us to make this training available to all qualified applicants. These scholarships have been particularly important for some of our non-EU students, including several from Africa, enabling us to supply talent globally.” datacentremagazine.com

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ROBUST INTERNSHIP PROGRAMMES DELIVER TALENT Author: Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director at Infrastructure Masons ommScope and Vertiv are both important suppliers to the global digital infrastructure industry, delivering missioncritical products and solutions that keep the world connected. And both companies

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compete with better-known brand names for talent. Internship programmes are a key way both companies recruit early career professionals.

CommScope is a leading provider of network equipment and cabling, and their internship program brought about 100 rising university juniors and seniors (3rd and 4th year) and graduate students

INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

• Engineering • Marketing & Sales • Finance and Accounting • Product Line Management • Supply Chain • Quality • Software Development • Information Technology

into the company this year to gain some hands-on experience. Like the company, CommScope’s internship programme is global, and they recruit interns in locations where they have significant facilities. This year they took on interns in the US, China, Taiwan, India, Singapore, Columbia, Brazil, Mexico, Czech Republic, and the UK, in functions including:

Key Success Factor: Specific Job Descriptions for Each Internship To ensure that each internship adds value to both the intern and the company, CommScope writes a specific job description for each internship position.

“It would be easier to have one generic job description for all interns,” said Jordan Thomas, University Recruiter at CommScope, “However, we’ve found that having the managers write a custom job description helps them think through the type of intern they want, what the project and deliverables are, what resources the intern will need, how success will be measured, and how they will supervise the intern. This strategy seems to be working because many of our intern applications come from friends and family of past interns who had a great experience.”

Internships are also the core strategy for sourcing early career talent at Vertiv, the $4 billion US-based manufacturer of power and cooling equipment for data centres worldwide. The company has emerged from five years of ownership changes with a clear vision to grow and the resources to do it. “We plan to hire 600 engineers between now and the end of the year,” said Chris Anderson, Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition. “We’re focusing on key locations with strong engineering schools, including Pune, India; Shian and Shenzen, China; Zagreb, Croatia; and the US”, datacentremagazine.com

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continued Anderson. “We expect 20% of those new hires to be early career and new college graduates. Plus, the company recently decided to go after an additional 50 fresh grads in the spring of 2022 for our new Engineering R&D programme. So, yeah, we’re growing! And, our internship programme is key.”

Early Career Hires Drive Diversity 2020 was a rocky year for internships due to COVID, but Vertiv’s internship program has come back strong, hiring over 60 interns this year. “Like most of the tech industry, we’re not where we want to be on diversity. We have work to do,” reported Rachel Taylor, US University Relations and Chair of Women At Vertiv Excel, or WAVE, the company’s Employee Resource Group for women and their allies. She continued, “The good news is that colleges and universities, and the military, are very diverse, so hiring the best talent we can find in those pools is the most natural way to achieve our diversity goals.”

Interns Do Important Work and Gain Exposure Like CommScope, Vertiv works hard to make sure each intern has a good experience, and referrals from past interns are a key source of new interns. “Our interns aren’t out on intern island,” quipped Taylor. “They are working alongside our regular employees doing real projects.

As a lean company, we need them making real contributions, and they don’t disappoint.” Taylor continued, “Vertiv is a very flat organisation, plus our executives are extremely approachable. Everyone, including our interns, interacts with the executives regularly. At Vertiv, you’ll get the access and touchpoints in a year that it would take you three years to get at other companies. You don’t feel like you’re at a 20,000 person company.”

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“ While our industry is growing at a breakneck pace, the industry is also working in partnership with the education sector to meet that need, and those efforts are quickly accelerating.”

JULIE ALBRIGHT

BOARD OF DIRECTORS, INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

Microsoft Data Center Academies Preparing IT Techs Author: Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director at Infrastructure Masons icrosoft strives to be a good neighbour in the communities where they site data centres. That’s the charter of the company’s Datacenter Community Development (DCCD) initiative. One of the “pillars'' of the initiative is workforce development, with the purpose of delivering digital skills training to help community members take advantage of employment opportunities in the IT sector, including work at hyperscale data centres.

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To support this goal, Microsoft, in partnership with local community colleges, has developed the Datacentre Academy (DCA) programme. The programme is active with 13 education partners in communities where Microsoft has major data centres; six in Europe and Africa, and seven in the United States, the most recent in Phoenix and San Antonio. “We work with our education partners to advise on curriculum. Microsoft doesn’t develop the curriculum, but we do approve it,” said Anthony Putorek, Senior Global Work Force Development Programme Manager. “The 126

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courses are based on vendor-neutral industry standards. We’ve partnered with CompTIA and many of the courses are based on their certifications, like A+, and Network+.”

“Most of the schools offer the students two approaches,” continued Bob Reitinger, also a Senior Programme Manager for Workforce Development. “The schools usually offer a two-year Associate’s degree that students can pursue if they want a college degree, or they can take certification courses ala carte, if that helps them develop the skills for the job opportunities they are seeking.”

INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS

In addition to advising on IT curriculum, Microsoft also provides scholarships, especially for students from underrepresented populations in IT; helps design and build datacentre labs for use by the students through donated hardware; and offers paid internships.

“DCA interns rotate through a number of different roles during their work experience, providing them with a comprehensive, end-toend work experience,” continued Putorek. “As a result, even if the intern doesn’t come to work with us, they’ve received very valuable work experience they can apply to an IT career.”

“The opportunity offered through DCAs is often life-changing,” continued Reitinger.

“Often DCA students are working several jobs, trying to earn enough to support their families. After receiving a degree or certifications through the DCA programme, graduates are often able to find work in the IT sector that provides better income. That’s a game-changer for many people in the communities we serve.”

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CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

Lee Myall, CEO, Kao Data

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CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

SUSTAINABLE HPC AT SCALE With HPC demand rising in tandem with the need for more sustainable design, we talk to Lee Myall, CEO of Kao Data, about delivering green HPC

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WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

s digital transformation initiatives continue to gather momentum, data gravity intensifies, and the demand for ultra-high-performance computing (HPC) in fields ranging from supply chain and retail to medical research increases, the global data centre industry increasingly finds itself torn between two seemingly incompatible trends. On the one hand, you have this massive growth in data demand. Enterprises want greater rack densities, more powerful computers, and greater support for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.

On the other hand, you have the existential threat of the climate crisis. After a summer characterised by some of the most extreme weather events in history, and with the warnings of climate scientists growing direr with each passing week, data centre operators are staring into the datacentremagazine.com

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“ Frankly, no one in the UK is working harder to push the boundaries of data centre sustainability than us” LEE MYALL CEO, KAO DATA

face of a sustainability reckoning. From moratoriums on construction to all-out bans on industries like cryptocurrency mining, this energy-intensive industry has never faced harsher scrutiny.

While finding a way to reconcile HPC demand with the need for a fundamental shift in the way that the industry tackles sustainability might seem like an impossibility, there are several organisations working to do just that. In the UK town of Harlow, between Cambridge

and London, one of them looks like it might be pulling it off.

Kao Data: HPC and the future of Healthcare “Frankly, no one in the UK is working harder to push the boundaries of data centre sustainability than us,” explains Lee Myall, CEO of Kao Data. Founded in 2014, Kao Data is the UK’s leading provider of HPC colocation services. Its Harlow campus - built on the site where Sir Charles Kao discovered fibre optic cable in 1966 - first spun up in 2018 with a 2.2 MW data centre.

Since then, the site has grown into what Myall calls “the UK’s only industrial-scale data centre campus that’s been specifically designed to accommodate the needs of HPC, AI and GPU-accelerated computing.”

In October of the same year, the campus datacentremagazine.com

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NVIDIA Cambridge-1 Inauguration The UK’s Most Powerful Supercomputer

“ There is nothing standard about the way we design and build at Kao Data” LEE MYALL CEO, KAO DATA

became one of the first data centre sites in Europe to obtain OCP-Ready status from the Open Compute Project. This, combined with the fact that the campus remains the UK Innovation Corridor's only NVIDIA DGX-Ready certified facility, makes Kao Data’s Harlow site uniquely positioned to “deliver customised architectures for biocomputational analysis, quant and grid computing.”

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- something the COVID-19 crisis has only made more apparent. “The pandemic has shown us that healthcare, like many other industries, is increasingly data and science-driven, both in terms of sequencing human genomes and identifying COVID19 variants, in vaccine and drug discovery, and in monitoring community spread and within Track and Trace,” Myall explains. “All these enormous datasets have to be stored safely, processed, analysed, and made available to a global community of scientific,

CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

Three key lessons from sustainable HPC Q. Say I run a standard colocation data centre, is there anything I can learn from the way you design and build your facilities?

A. The first thing to say is that there is nothing standard about the way we design and build at Kao Data. However, there are three key things that people can learn from us.

Firstly, sustainability is at the core of everything we do, even to the point where we have become the first UK data centre to switch all of our backup diesel generation to Crown Oil HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil). This is a pioneering move that effectively removes the use of all fossil fuels from our site.

Secondly, we’ve strived for the highest standards of technical excellence and hosting. From being OCP and DGX-Ready, to becoming the closest hyperscale

on-ramp to Cambridge through our work with Megaport, we’re continually striving to achieve the highest levels of service for our customers so they can spend more time on their compute, and less time worrying about the infrastructure and connectivity.

Thirdly, we adopt a process of continuous learning and industry stewardship, something that remains ingrained within our culture from the top down. That means we’re involved with several associations across the industry, including ASHRAE, BREAAM, the iMasons, techUK and The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact. We proactively share our expertise with other industry members. Furthermore, we’re continually innovating within our own space, and thus, the next iteration of our data centre campus will be different to the first – embracing key learnings from KDL1 to push the boundaries of the next design and build.

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pharmaceutical and research institutions.”

Storing vast datasets for big data analysis is only part of the puzzle that Kao Data’s Harlow campus is helping to solve, however.

In July of this year, NVIDIA officially launched its Cambridge-1 supercomputer, a $100mn project to create the UK’s most powerful supercomputer to date, hosted within Kao Data’s Harlow campus.

“As the UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, Cambridge-1 is focussed on a number of important areas, including digital biology, bioinformatics, and genomics research, and will be transformative for the healthcare industry globally,” says Myall, adding that Kao’s ability to host Cambridge-1 supports the work of its founding partners, which include AstraZeneca, GSK, Oxford Nanopore, King’s College London, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. Harnessing the power of Cambridge-1, underpinned

by Kao Data’s hyper-dense architecture, these partners “are leveraging AI to gain a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, to design new drugs and to improve the accuracy of finding diseasecausing variations in human genomes,” Myall explains.

NVIDIA's Cambridge-1 isn’t the be-all and end-all of Kao Data’s support for hyper-dense HPC in the UK and Europe, however. The company also hosts the European Bioinformatics Institute’s HPC cluster - a massive web of computing assets and bioinformatic datasets which are accessed more than 80mn times per day by “researchers across Europe.”

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disease prevention in future.” But the real challenge - and one of the key reasons behind Kao Data’s ability to attract some of the densest, most critical HPC workloads in the region to its campus - is delivering on these monumental HPC demands in a way that mitigates the technology’s eye-watering demand for power, especially when those demands can vary dramatically from one project to another.

Green HPC While it’s common enough for data centre operators to retrofit more sustainable design

CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

features into their facilities, Kao Data’s Harlow campus was conceived from day one as an exercise in marrying its substantial HPC capabilities with sustainable practice.

“Kao Data London-One (KDL1) was specifically designed to cater for the most power and compute-intensive workloads, and to be able to power and cool them in the most environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient way,” says Myall. “Central to this was the use of Future Facilities Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which allowed us to both model and simulate our technical suites under a number of

operating conditions. The findings enabled us to fine-tune performance and airflows, ensuring we could prioritise sustainable operations and were instrumental in helping us support Cambridge-1.” As a result, the campus runs at a consistent PUE of 1.2, even at partial loads (well below the industry average - particularly considering the density of its IT architecture), is powered entirely by renewable energy, and uses mechanical and refrigerant free indirect evaporative cooling.

While Myall explains that the Harlow campus typically uses this indirect datacentremagazine.com

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“ HPC is the engine behind many of the measures that have helped us begin to fight back against COVID-19, and it will be instrumental for disease prevention in future” LEE MYALL CEO, KAO DATA

evaporative cooling to maintain its industryleading PUE across racks with densities ranging between 20-40kW, he adds that “if an AI or HPC organisation wanted to accommodate higher rack or power densities, or to use direct-to-chip liquid cooling, we have the ability to customise the infrastructure accordingly, and the engineering expertise to support them.”

It’s this combination of sustainable and HPC expertise that has allowed the Harlow campus to marry ultra-dense IT architecture capable of hosting the UK’s most powerful supercomputer with green design techniques that conspire to make the Harlow campus one of the country’s most sustainable facilities as well. “The technical expertise of our leadership team, and the ability to power and cool supercomputing systems, such as NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, sustainably, means we’ve built a green and environmentally conscious home for HPC and AI.” As demand for high-tech applications continues to rise, and as the need for a more sustainable data centre industry becomes increasingly dire, Kao Data could end up serving as a blueprint for the future relationship between HPC data centres and the sector’s green ambitions. datacentremagazine.com

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SANJAY KR SAINANI ON PRE-FABRICATED

DATA CENTERS, ZERO CARBON AND LEVERAGING AI FOR AUTOMATION & EFFICIENCY WRITTEN BY: HELEN ADAMS PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Sanjay Kr Sainani, Global SVP & CTO, Huawei

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HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES

Sanjay Kr Sainani, the Global SVP & CTO at Huawei, discusses data centre innovation and sustainability and how international study shaped him

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veryday, more than three billion people around the world use Huawei products, to connect with others or for solitary internet browsing.

As one of the leading global providers of information and communications technology, infrastructure and smart devices, Huawei’s 197,000 employees are based across 170 countries.

The mission at Huawei is to build a fully connected, intelligent world, through bringing digital technology to every person, home and organisation.

As the world shifts to become more sustainable, the Digital Power Business Group within Huawei is working to integrate digital and power electronic technologies for a greener future.

Data Centre caught up with Sanjay Kr Sainani, the Global SVP & CTO at Huawei.

Sainani is responsible for global business development and for innovation in Data Centre Solution offerings.

Sainani has worked with Huawei for seven years and in that time, he has seen a lot of change within the business.

“My experience at Huawei has been thrilling”, explains Sainani. “In 2014, the year I joined Huawei, our global revenue was US$46bn. In 2020, it was in excess of US$120bn. We have made huge inroads into the Cloud, 5G & Enterprise markets with IT, Cloud, Unified Communications, Big Data, AI, ML & Data Centre Solutions.” datacentremagazine.com

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Title of the video

5G is one of Huawei’s most powerful tools. The fifth generation of mobile phone technology known as 5G follows on from 4G, offering users faster connectivity.

“Our 5G roll outs lead the way in the telecom infrastructure deployments worldwide”, Sainani says proudly. “Our leadership in Consumer scaled new peaks, although there have been strong head-winds in this space, but with the launch of our new Harmony OS, we believe Huawei will create another major ecosystem in consumer and wearable space. We are the fastest growing Cloud Services Provider globally and our investment in the Cloud and the Cloud ecosystem is producing strong results.”

One of the most important technologies for managing energy efficiency is digital power, where-in bits manage watts. Huawei 142

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has been a late comer to the digital power party after returning into the business in 2010, but as of 2020, Huawei’s digital power is a force to be reckoned with.

Huawei’s technology focus on digital power is by innovation through: • Converging energy and information flows to use “Bits to Manage Watts” • Developing a clean power system with a focus on Solar & Energy Storage • Promoting comprehensive electrification in the transport industry • Zero Carbon Transformative Solutions within ICGT Infrastructure • Intelligent and Low LCOE energy storage • Open Energy Cloud, as an enablement platform for the Energy Internet ecosystem.

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES

SANJAY KR SAINANI TITLE: GLOBAL SVP & CTO LOCATION: UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Sanjay is the Global SVP & CTO for the Digital Power Business at Huawei Technologies, responsible for world-wide Business Development and driving innovation and strategy for the DatamCenter Business.

Sanjay specializes in Mission Critical Infrastructure, Data Centers, Power, Thermal Management, Sustainability, Software & Controls. His core expertise in designing and building Digital & Energy Infrastructure for Hyper-scalers, Cloud, Colocation, Solar Energy Producers, Telecom providers and Governments. In recent years he has been involved in developing the Pre-fabricated Data Center, AI and ML enabled Data Center Automation and Zero Carbon solutions and business at Huawei.

He has more than 30 years of experience in Leadership roles, Business Development and Start-ups across US, Middle-East & Asia Pacific Markets. He is a recognized “Trusted Advisor” to many customers, partners and influencers.

What’s next? Is his mantra.

“Challenging assumptions, expanding the horizons, continually innovating, teaming

EXECUTIVE BIO

“For the fourth year in succession, Huawei is the world’s largest provider of PV Inverters for Grid scale PV power plants”, said Sainani.

“Our Data Centre business has revolutionised the Pre-fabricated Modular Data Centre build, and we are today by far the largest prefab data centre provider globally. The rapid deployment of 5G is supported by MIMO rectifier solutions that are both efficient, compact, future proof and more importantly robust in extreme environments. Our latest offering is solutions for the EV industry that include charging stations as well as drive trains as an OEM to EV manufacturers.”

However, Huawei is also taking care to balance its technological aspirations with its environmental concerns.

“As both generations moves towards solar and renewables and users move

with self-motivated, talented people and leading from the trenches to deliver customers with an amazing experience across the evolving business life-cycle.”

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towards an all electric age, Huawei is very well positioned to leverage its expertise and experience to bring more value to our customers in the quest towards a Zero Carbon Society”, said Sainani.

Study abroad created an understanding for unique perspectives Sainani has studied, interned and worked abroad and the accumulated experiences

“ A lot of my work on innovation is with focus on future proof solutions that are Available, Energy Efficient and Sustainable” SANJAY KR SAINANI, GLOBAL SVP & CTO, HUAWEI

have taught him about the keys to growing a sustainable business.

“The academic journey has been very full-filling”, said Sainani. “I did my BS in Power Electronics in 1988, which now in retrospect, was 15 years ahead of its time.

We studied and conducted lab simulations on cutting edge power conversion technologies as practical applications were not yet industrialised. Study and project work included variable speed drives with regenerative braking, MV Solid State Power control, Converters, Inverters which are the backbone today for Power Converters, Electric Vehicles and Charging Systems.”

“My study in Japan on an AOTS scholarship was focused on Power Electronics & Robotics”, explains Sainani.

“Again, it was too early for its day in the spotlight! My Japan experience gave me a very strong insight into the Culture of Quality, JIT manufacturing systems and more importantly business discipline and respect for time. datacentremagazine.com

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“Studies in the US mid-way in my career exposed me to management practices prevalent in regions of the world, unique perspectives and how attitudes and culture shape organisational behaviour, which is key to building a sustainable and growing business that is admired by both employees and customers.”

Partnerships and progress “At Huawei we recognised the gap in the Data Centre build market”, said Sainani.

“The traditional approach of build to design resulted in two procurement cycles, and delivery focused on best of breed, component based solution.”

Sainani believes that customers today expect Data Centre build-outs in matter of months, not years. The expectation is of a system level performance and not limited to compliance to product specifications.

“At Huawei our EPC delivery model of Prefab Modular Data Centre is based on the four main values: • Single Point of responsibility/Turnkey Contract • Fixed price contracts with no-cost overruns • Short TTM • System Level Performance KPI’s To be able to deliver this, Huawei has an extensive eco-system of Product and Services Delivery OEM’s that include MV, LV, DG, Chiller Vendors, Civil, MEP Contractors and CE firms.”

It all started with the humble “Data Centre in a box” or its predecessor “telecom shelter.

“As customers were under pressure to build and deploy Data Centre Services within a very short period of time, while improving the quality of build and reducing the cost, 146

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“ Huawei is very well positioned to leverage its expertise and experience to bring more value to our customers in the quest towards a Zero Carbon Society” SANJAY KR SAINANI, GLOBAL SVP & CTO, HUAWEI

Huawei put its Data Centre technology expertise and project delivery experience to test”, said Sainani. “Our turnkey solution is an EPC delivery model with a fixed price contract. The Prefabricated Solution relies on much of the construction and fit-out to be done at the factory to provide a consistent and high quality factory finish.

The Modular aspect of the solution allows

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES

Huawei to build a Data Centre customised to fit the customer’s business/application scenario while using standardised building blocks, thereby offering a very high level of modularity and scalability at a building level.

Huawei offers turnkey prefab data center solutions from 1 MW to 100+ MW campus.

We have successfully delivered over 100MW of prefab Data centres globally and have another 75MW of Data Centres on order.

We are able to offer turnkey builds including Design & Build from 6 months to 15 months depending mainly on size and statutory approval time-lines.” Huawei’s experience with Daikin began in China and both

companies are very technology focused and customer centric.

“In many of our turnkey EPC Prefab Modular Data Centre Build projects, Daikin Chiller Solutions were a good fit for the performance and TCO expectations and coupled with local support infrastructure to provide high availability during project life-cycle and so has been a vendor of choice accepted by customer and their technical engineers. We are also working together to explore innovative cooling solutions to further reduce the cooling energy consumption and making the overall solution simple and intelligent.” datacentremagazine.com

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My Passion, from the environment to energy efficiency Another area where Sainani has spent a lot of time working on is Huawei’s energy efficiency and sustainability solutions.

“This is an area I am very passionate about”, said Sainani. “A lot of my work on innovation is with focus on future proof solutions that are available, energy efficient and sustainable.

WORK IS BEING DONE IN FOUR AREAS: Power Conversion & Energy Storage technology “Our UPS technology offers the industry first hot-swappable 100KW UPS module in 3U form factor. Allowing a 1.2 MW UPS footprint to be that of 2 IT cabinets. All of this at an operating efficiency in excess of 96.5%.

“Our Smart Li Battery is a LiFP battery offering, is completely modular and offers twice the life-cycle, 70% reduction 148

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in weight and footprint as compared to traditional batteries.”

Heat extraction Management “Efficient and effective heat extraction is key at component and system level. For example Smart engineering allows us to extract heat from our UPS modules very efficiently thereby allowing us to have a compact 3 U form factor.

“Use of special materials for Evaporator, EC fan motors, Variable Speed Compressors, Thin wet Film humidifiers, Indirect evaporative cooling are examples of making heat extraction from components or from data centers efficient and effective.”

Leverage AI & ML for Availability and System level Efficiency “Embedded IoT provides us with a lot of real-time data, which can be used to predict health of systems and in case of cooling can assist to identify through regression

analysis the best efficiency operating point of the system which includes fans, pumps, compressors etc.

“In addition AI & ML allows unattended and remote maintenance and operation possible with high degree of confidence.”

Technology, Materials and Processes for Sustainability “New Silicon in power electronics should help us transform copper and magnetic core to Silicon with MV UPS’s. Custom composites improve heat transfer making cooling machines more efficient. Use of Modular Prefab helps to reduce concrete in the Data Centre Construction thereby reducing the embedded carbon footprint.”

Huawei ensuring a carbon neutral future The next 12 months and beyond for Sainani and Huawei, will be focused on maintaining stability between technological progress and heading towards carbon neutrality.

“ Today, carbon neutrality is a mission shared by the entire world” SANJAY KR SAINANI, GLOBAL SVP & CTO, HUAWEI

“Today, carbon neutrality is a mission shared by the entire world”, said Sainani.

“Major economies have successfully implemented new green deals which have begun a new round of economic development and innovation. We believe this will further drive extensive and profound economic and social transformation that will revolutionise energy production and consumption. Our focus over the next many months is to restructure our organisation - Digital Power Company of Huawei to take advantage of this huge business opportunity.”

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EMERGING DATA CENTRE

MARKETS

As demand for digital infrastructure in underserved areas of the world grows, we take a look at the top 10 emerging data centre markets globally 150

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ll around the world (but particularly in APAC), rising real estate prices, component costs, and concerns over sustainability are pushing data centre industry growth in the direction of emerging markets. “There has been a noticeable shift from industry players to ride the next wave of growth in non-traditional markets,” said Ralph Davidson, Head of Regional Industries at JLL, in a recent report. With cloud traffic in Asia alone expected to soar by 150% over the next few years, and the demand for digital infrastructure in underserved metropoles expected to boom along with it, the future of data centre industry growth indisputably lies in its emerging markets.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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NAIROBI, KENYA

No. of Data Centres: 7 Major Build: IXAfrica is currently

building a 42.5 MW data centre in the city, which will be the region’s largest hyperscale and colocation campus upon completion.

Major Operators: IXAfrica, Africa Data Centers, PAIX For decades now, South Africa and Egypt have been the bookends of digital infrastructure in Africa, with the countries in between left woefully underserved. Now, that state of affairs is changing rapidly.

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi is poised to become a leading hub for the East African data centre industry, thanks to a booming population, increased cloud adoption, favourable climate, and readily available locally generated green energy.

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09

MADRID, SPAIN

No. of Data Centres: 22 Major Build: Merlin Properties

and Edged Energy plan to construct three facilities in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao. Each is estimated to add over 85,000 sq ft of whitespace.

Major Operators: Equinix, Digital Realty (Interxion), Nabiax Spain’s position as a leading hub for hyperscale and cloud services in Europe is strengthening yearon-year. As investment grows, the market in Madrid is consolidating rapidly, with the last few years being defined by a flurry of high profile acquisitions. Equinix snapped up local firm Itconic in 2017, and Asterion has spent the past few years steadily acquiring all the data centres belonging to Spanish telecom company Telefónica. AWS, Google, and Microsoft all already have, or are planning to build, cloud regions in Spain.

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08

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

No. of Data Centres: 24 Turkish Data Centre Industry Growth (2021-2025): 15% Major Operators: Equinix, Vodafone, Turkcell

Since the dawn of civilization, Istanbul (or Constantinople, or Byzantium before that) has stood at the crossroads of the world, straddling the bridge between Europe and Asia. Today, that fact is starting to attract serious interest and investment into the city’s data centre industry. Major hyperscale and colocation players like Equinix have identified Istanbul as a strategic location, and digital infrastructure in the city is only expected to grow in the coming years.

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CYBERJAYA, MALAYSIA

No. of Data Centres: 15 Share of Total Indonesian Capacity: 70% Major Operators: NTT, Keppel Data Centres, Regal Orion

Strategically located in the heart of Southeast Asia, Malaysia is on the cusp of a cloud and digital infrastructure boom that builds on a level of relative market maturity compared to surrounding countries. Intentionally designed as the heart of Malaysia’s tech economy, Cyberjaya is the fastestgrowing data centre market in the country, including a 50 MW hyperscale data centre under construction by AIMS DC. datacentremagazine.com

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05

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

No. of Data Centres: 27 New Projects in 2020: 4 Major Operators: Ascenty, Equinix, Scala Data Centers

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HANOI, VIETNAM

No. of Data Centres: 11 Vietnamese Data Centre Market (2025): $1.6bn Major Operators: FPT Corporation, KDDI, Viettel

Vietnam’s digital economy is booming, thanks to strong consumer adoption of electronics and a high rate of digital literacy.

There is also growing interest and demand from Vietnamese companies for cloud services.

The country’s data centre industry is concentrated in Ho Chi Minh City to the South, Da Nang in the middle, and the capital of Hanoi in the north. So far, colocation infrastructure in Hanoi remains underdeveloped for a city of its size, although this is set to change in the near future.

Another market in possession of a booming population and a lack of digital infrastructure, São Paulo is Brazil’s biggest data centre market. Digital Realty alone operates 13 sites in the city.

Brazil itself is the top data centre market in Latin America, with roughly 17 companies operating more than 44 colocation facilities in the country. That number rises significantly if you also count the number of sites operated by telecom carriers. São Paulo received more than $295mn of data centre investment last year, and is on track to host an AWS cloud region within the city.

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04

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

No. of Data Centres: 33 Biggest Project: Rostelecom is

building an 80 MW data centre on the outskirts of Moscow, attached to a nuclear power plant.

Major Operators: Rostelecom, MTS, IXcellerate Russia has been described as the next great frontier of data centre development. IXcellerate CEO, Guy Willner, expanded on the phenomenon in a recent interview, saying “Until just a few years ago, there was more data center capacity in Luxemburg than in all of Russian Federation.” According to Willner, the Russian market is on track to grow at double the rate of Western Europe and the US over the next five years, with the lion’s share of that growth centred in Moscow. With the exception of a few privately owned campuses IXcellerate’s two hyperscale sites being among them - the majority of data centres in Moscow are owned and operated by stateowned operator Rostelecom and its subsidiaries.

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03

JAKARTA, INDONESIA No. of Data Centres: 29 Primary Source of Data Centre Investment: Hyperscale Cloud

Major Operators: Princeton Digital, Keppel Data Centres, SpaceDC

Jakarta is one of several Southeast Asian markets to benefit from the Singapore data centre moratorium. Indonesia’s data centre industry market was valued at $1.53bn in 2020, and it is expected to reach a value of just over $3bn by 2026, registering a CAGR of 12.95%. Jakarta is home to more than 10mn people and is growing fast, bringing its digital economy along with it, and the focus is expected to remain firmly on Jakarta. According to a Mordor Intelligence report, “the demand for data services and infrastructure is expected to increase exponentially,” in Indonesia’s leading market over the next few years.

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CHENNAI, INDIA

No. of Data Centres: 14 Subsea Cable Landing Stations: 4 Major Operators: Tata Communications, STT Global Data Centres, NTT

The Indian data centre market is booming, as numerous megatrends collide with near-seismic force.

The country possesses a massive population (so big that the government is reportedly considering a two-child policy - because that sort of thing worked out so well for China) that remains largely underserved with digital services, a rapidly expanding IT sector, and a current dearth of data centre capacity. Chennai is poised to be one of the Indian cities most heavily-affected by the boom, with a regional data centre capacity expected to more than double in the next three years, hitting 174 MW by 2023.

“ The Indian data centre market is booming, as numerous megatrends collide with nearseismic force” datacentremagazine.com

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“ The largest source of investment outside of Tokyo”

OSAKA, JAPAN

No. of Data Centres: 14 Regional Standing: Osaka is

the fifth largest APAC data centre market outside of China Major Operators: Telehouse, Digital Realty, KDDI While Japan is one of the world’s most mature data centre markets as a whole, development is largely focused around the country’s largest population hub, Tokyo, where there were 57 active data centre facilities as of June 2021. Osaka, by contrast, has a mere 14. That number is rising steadily, however, with the city pegged in a recent report as the largest source of investment outside of Tokyo, including a recently announced 78 MW campus currently being built out by ESR Cayman and Hong Kong Logistics. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft Azure, and IBM, are all expanding into the city, which has become a true hub for the Japanese tech sector in recent years.

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FILLING IN THE GAPS WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

OPER8 GLOBAL

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Mike Andrea, CEO of Oper8 Global, talks data centre management, IoT, security, and edge, delivered as-a-service through collaborative win-win partnerships

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he global data centre and IT infrastructure landscape has changed radically over the past 10 years, and Oper8 Global has changed with it. Oper8 Global is the result of shifting customer demand in the face of an evolving data centre market, and since its foundation in 2012, has developed a unique value proposition, range of capabilities, and attitude towards its partner ecosystem that are driving its rapid global expansion.

“Oper8 Global's core go-to-market model centres on helping organisations operate their IT assets,” explains Mike Andrea, co-founder and CEO of Oper8 Global. “We don't mind if those assets are fully online in the public cloud, in a hybrid cloud model, a private cloud model, or fully on-prem; it's about helping the customer right-size their needs, rather than have them be dictated to by whatever trend is hottest in the market at that moment.”

I sat down with Andrea to explore the genesis of Oper8 Global and dig down into the unique value proposition and core competencies propelling the Brisbanefounded data centre services firm towards a truly globalised platform with cutting edge offerings. “We're looking at 200% growth in revenue over the next 12 months. We're looking at hiring substantially over that time, and we see ourselves bringing some great new products into the market as well,” adds datacentremagazine.com

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Oper8 Global: Filling in the Gaps

Andrea. In order to trace that stellar growth trajectory, it’s important to take a better look at the company’s roots, and the series of events that led to its inception.

Unpacking the Pedigree In 2004, Andrea and his business partner Chris Goldstone founded Strategic Directions, a business management consulting firm with a focus on IT. Then, around 2010, Andrea recalls that the demands of Strategic Directions’ customers changed. “Strategic Directions would help with our customers' IT strategy, vendor management model, telecommunications strategy, as well as what was becoming at that time an industry-wide shift towards cloud and various as-a-service models,” he recalls. Within the space of a single week, Andrea continues, he was approached by two completely independent customers asking for Strategic Directions to manage their IT infrastructure. “We really weren't 166

October 2021

set up to be an IT management firm, so originally we told those customers 'no' and that IT management wasn't something we were interested in doing, and said we'd help them find someone who could do that,” says Andrea. “Those customers - again, independently of one another - told us that 'no, you don't understand; if you can't do it then we'll find someone else who can do both'."

Initially, Andrea and Goldstone tried to incorporate an element of IT managementas-a-service into Strategic Directions’ capabilities. However, Andrea explains, “we found that it really began to confuse our market and existing customers about what Strategic Directions was doing.” As a result, Goldstone and Andrea made the decision in 2012 to spin out the management-asa-service arm of Strategic Directions into Oper8, an independent firm focused on operational management of IT. “You've also got to keep in mind that Strategic Directions

OPER8 GLOBAL

MIKE ANDREA TITLE: CEO INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRE/ IT MANAGEMENT LOCATION: AUSTRALIA

EXECUTIVE BIO

already had a pretty good pedigree when it came to data centre management, project management, and IT operational strategy,” says Andrea, who adds that “We brought a lot of those capabilities across to Oper8, and the business ended up focusing on data centre management, security, IoT, and the edge.”

Today, those initial competencies developed within Strategic Directions form the backbone of Oper8 Global’s offerings. However, expertise in data centre management, security, IoT, and edge infrastructure aren’t the only thing carried over into Oper8’s operating model. Andrea explains that the company’s consultancy heritage also plays a key role in Oper8 Global’s unique approach to partnerships and service mixing. As a result, “Oper8 Global takes a very direct and meaningful approach to working with our partners,” he explains, adding that “We don't hide from our customers that we're actively working with our key partners to facilitate the right

Over 34 years’ experience in the ICT industry, covering strategy, solution design, architecture, and management across commercial, government and multinational sectors. Holds a Diploma of Applied Science – Computing, is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD), and is a Certified CEO (CCEO #350). An 11 year member of the Board of Directors, AFCOM Data Centre Institute, USA, and is the only board member appointed from outside North America.

Co-author of data centre industry white papers with the DCI Board, and is a regular speaker at Data Centre World and similar global conferences.

OPER8 GLOBAL

solution for them. Part of that process is that we act as the coordinator to help the customer get the right blend of services from each of our key partners to make the overall outcome much more valuable than if they were to just pick and choose different pieces on an ad hoc basis.”

Think of it like eating tapas as opposed to a steak and a pile of sides; there’s an emphasis on egalitarianism, collaboration, and facilitation within Oper8 Global’s ecosystem that feels refreshingly customer-focused.

“We don't get precious about who's leading any one discussion with a customer,” says Andrea. “True partnership is win-win, and we don't mind who leads those partnerships.”

And it sounds like Oper8’s customers and partners appreciate the approach.

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“When we find a partner that wants to really work with us towards a win-win outcome for our customers, it's fantastic” MIKE ANDREA

CEO, OPER8 GLOBAL

OPER8 GLOBAL

An Inverted Approach to Two Markets Oper8 was born out of Australia, which is where the firm still does a significant portion of its business. However, in addition to growing into new markets throughout APAC, Oper8 really went global in 2019, when the company expanded into the UK in order to better target EMEA. Andrea explains that “The APAC market right now is very focused on cybersecurity and helping organisations pick the right mix of operational platforms such as hardware security modules.”

That cybersecurity focus, he notes, is the driving force behind Oper8 Global’s new wave of products, including PayG8, NetG8, DataM8, and SafeG8 that it’s currently bringing to market.

The EMEA market, on the other hand, is a very different beast, where Andrea is seeing “a huge focus in Europe in modular and micro data centres and high performance computing” (HPC). It’s an interesting inversion between the two

regions, with APAC focusing “firmly on the security and cybersecurity market” (although Andrea notes that data centre and micro modular facilities are more of a secondary consideration, as opposed to ignored entirely), and EMEA “very much focused on data centre projects with security as a supporting element with respect to how to help our customers right-size and facilitate their product mix.”

However, even though Oper8’s two main markets have their priorities reversed, Andrea stresses that “it's the blended coordination between data centres and security that's really the driving factor for our operations in both of those markets for us at this stage.”

Filling in the Gaps Oper8 Global also maintains a heavy focus on R&D, and the products it designs aim to support the seamless cooperation of its partners’ products and services. “The approach we take to R&D very much centres on filling gaps. We don't have to be the best datacentremagazine.com

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OPER8 GLOBAL

PAYG8: KEEPING IT SIMPLE AND SECURE Oper8 Global’s core competencies, data centres, IoT, and edge, are all underpinned by a wealth of security expertise. This dedication to keeping customers safer with simplified, turnkey security solutions is reflected in Oper8 Global’s turnkey HSM solution PayG8, which it developed and delivers in collaboration with Thales and Equinix.

Oper8 Global delivers the Thales payShield Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) through the payG8 Service across the Equinix global data centre environment.

“The heart of this product is picking the right partners that let us go to market with the right blend of capabilities and services. Our PayG8 service incorporates the capabilities of three companies, Oper8 Global, Thales, and Equinix, but we also have a monitoring capability in there that's fairly unique. We're using RF Code's technology to do real-time asset tracking and rack monitoring within the Pay8G service model,” explains Andrea. “So, we're taking advantage of an existing key partner's technology as part of our service mix to create PayG8, which is really focused around payment hardware security modules as-a-service.

The heart of what we do is blending different complementary technologies and services from within our four key competencies in order to complement a business model that makes sense for a customer.”

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at a whole thing, just at filling in the gaps for a customer,” says Andrea.

That ethos was the driving force behind the creation of Oper8’s SafeG8 solution, a rack-mounted safe aimed at improving the protections surrounding physical encryption keys and smart cards required to operate and manage hardware security modules. “We looked around the market and couldn't see anything that fits our needs when it comes to this kind of solution, so we're developing it ourselves,” Andrea explains.

He continues: “It's a similar story with DataM8. We've seen an issue with cloud

OPER8 GLOBAL

“We're looking at 200% growth in revenue over the next 12 months.

We're looking at hiring substantially over the time, and we see ourselves bringing some great new products into the market” MIKE ANDREA

CEO, OPER8 GLOBAL

backup, and we're working very closely with Dell and Equinix in terms of how we can bring that product to market as a cloud-adjacent backup strategy that allows organisations to be more cyber secure in terms of how they can recover after a disruption.” DataM8, like the rest of Oper8’s product line, has been designed from the ground up to be delivered as a service. Andrea explains that the R&D team has taken great pains to adhere to this mandate, as an as-a-service model “allows an organisation to stay within the monthly subscription based model they're already using, but augment their backup

and security without having to switch to a new, high-capex commercial model.”

The Future is Collaborative, Innovative, and Delivered As-A-Service Reflecting on the past, as well as Oper8’s plans for the future, Andrea stresses the fact that “A lot of what we do couldn't be done without our key partners. When we find a partner who wants to really work with us towards a win-win outcome for our customers, it's fantastic, and we've been really lucky to build several of those relationships with key partners like Equinix, Thales, RF Code, enLogic, and Chatsworth. Those organisations work datacentremagazine.com

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OPER8 GLOBAL

“The heart of what we do is blending different complementary technologies and services from within our four key competencies in order to complement a business model that makes sense for a customer” MIKE ANDREA

CEO, OPER8 GLOBAL

alongside Oper8, they communicate clearly and listen to what we need with respect to our product design and deployment in a very global sense, which means that we can replicate the same model, the same product set, and the same experience for our customers wherever they are.”

The future of Oper8’s business model, Andrea continues, is firmly rooted in HPC and security. Over the coming year, he explains that Oper8 will continue to focus on the rollouts of its PayG8, NetG8, DataM8, and SafeG8 solutions, continuing to work with its key partners to design, build, and deploy these as-a-service solutions.

“We've got new partners that we're starting discussions with right now surrounding new products that help us branch into new areas with respect to the healthcare marketspace,” he adds. “We see ourselves bringing some great new products into the market as well - particularly with regard to DataM8 and solving some of the technical challenges that arise with cloud to offcloud backup and retrieval, as well as backup and restoration.”

Lastly, Andrea explains that Oper8 Global is also looking at a number of acquisitions in order to further advance the company’s growth trajectory between now and the end of 2022. He adds that the process “is very much aligned to picking organisations that can enhance our capabilities across our four key areas of focus, and any acquisitions that we're looking at are going to be complementary to existing areas of the business. We've got a few things earmarked already and we very much see strategic acquisitions as part of our growth strategy over the next 12 to 18 months.”

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