Data Centre Magazine - February 2022

February 2022 | datacentremagazine.com

TECHNOLOGY The Age of African Hyperscale Cloud – OPENCOLO Customer service at the heart of a boutique data centre –

SUSTAINABLE Data Centre Companies – DATA CENTRES What does 2022 have in store for the industry?

AQUA COMMS Passing the connectivity baton from land to sea with Ontix

FL E X I B L E B ENEFI TS O F

BUILD-T -SUIT Brittany Miller, VP Design, Construction and Supply Chain at NTT Global Data Centers, on the flexibility provided by a bespoke solution

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The DataCentre Team EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

HARRY MENEAR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

SAM STEERS

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ

CREATIVE TEAM

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAH BIRLESON JORDAN WOOD VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

KIERAN WAITE

MEDIA SALES DIRECTORS

MOTION DESIGNER TYLER LIVINGSTONE

MANAGING DIRECTOR

MARKETING MANAGER

DAISY SLATER MARKETING DIRECTOR

ROSS GARRIGAN

PRODUCTION MANAGERS

PHILLINE VICENTE JANE ARNETA ELLA CHADNEY

MARTA EUGENIO ERNEST DE NEVE THOMAS EASTERFORD DREW HARDMAN

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

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PROJECT DIRECTOR

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JASON WESTGATE RICHARD TURNER JAMES WHITE LEWIS VAUGHAN CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN CEO

GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

Singapore’s back!... sort of.

After almost three years of pressing pause on new data centre developments, Singapore’s data centre industry is back in business - albeit with a few caveats in place designed to lessen the sector’s environmental impact.

“In particular, we seek to anchor data centres that are best in class in terms of resource efficiency, which can contribute towards Singapore’s economic and strategic objectives” MINISTER GAN KIM YONG

Singapore’s position as Southeast Asia’s leading data centre market has slipped over the past few years, thanks to a moratorium on new site construction imposed by the government. In 2019, the Singaporean authorities froze all new builds, due to concerns over the sustainability of prolonged and rapid growth.

Now, after almost three years, the moratorium has been lifted - at least provisionally. According to a statement by the country’s Trade and Industry Minister Gan Kim Yong in January, data centre operators will be able to resume construction. However, the Singaporean Government will be “more selective” when granting planning permission for new projects.

As of the end of 2021, Singapore was home to around 70 data centres with a combined capacity of just over 1 GW. In the year to come, we could expect to see those figures increase precipitously depending on exactly how “selective” the Singaporean government plans on being, of course.

HARRY MENEAR DATACENTRE MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

harry.menear@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 12 Big Picture 14 The Brief 16 Timeline: A giant in the low countries 18 Trailblazer: Funke Opeke The Mother of digital transformation 22 Five Minutes With: Fredrik Forslund

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Data Centres

What does 2022 have in store for the data centre industry?

28

NTT/Raging Wire Data Centers

Build-to-suit data centres offer customised solutions

54

Sunrise | UPC

More wow together!

108

Cloud & Edge

The edge is everywhere

78

Sustainability

Data centre sustainability: where do we go from here?

118

OpenColo

Customer service at the heart of a boutIque data centre

88

132

Democratising data storage

The age of African hyperscale cloud

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Y G T .

ES G LO ES .

N S I E .

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FO LLOW N OW

BIG PICTURE The Metaverse: Built on Data Centres Prineville, Oregon

Regardless of the exact shape this trend takes, it’s clear that the metaverse is going to require a lot of data centres - especially from the companies driving metaverse adoption, like the recently rebranded Meta (Facebook), which is pushing hard for the adoption of its Horizon World social VR experience.

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February 2022

“The proliferation of data is enormous and will undoubtedly increase demand for distributed compute” Heather Dooley

Infrastructure Masons

Image credit: Meta

datacentremagazine.com

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THE BRIEF “ There has been a fundamental shift in the connectivity landscape across [Africa] in the last ten years” ROBERT MULLINS CEO, Raxio Group READ MORE

“ To better facilitate the escalating need for agile, low latency interconnection, regional markets are increasing localised capacity” RUSSELL POOLE

UK Managing Director, Equinix

READ MORE

“ It’s imperative that carbon credits aren’t used as a substitute for genuine sustainability efforts” TATE CANTRELL

CTO, Verne Global READ MORE

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February 2022

The Old Abnormal Another year, another round of op-eds opening with “as the pandemic draws to a close.”

Yeah, doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, does it?

Not even slightly. With Omicron continuing to put us back to the earliest days of the pandemic, I feel pretty confident in saying that the “new normal” is going to look a lot more like the past 24 months than any bright new “postpandemic” world.

So what does this mean for the data centre industry?

More of the same, I guess.

The pandemic catalysed digital transformation, and demand continues to outstrip capacity. Industry analyst Ciarán Forde put it best recently when he said: “When you remove a catalyst, the reactions it caused do not reverse themselves. The increased

reliance on data centres… is here to stay.”

Well that’s good for the data centres.

Not necessarily. Forde also rightly pointed out that “A decades-long efficiency drive, which held data centres to steady demand levels while processing much more, has run out of headroom.”

Sustainability has been a higher-profile issue, that’s for sure.

Indeed. Projects are being halted, bans are being considered, token greenwashing is no longer palatable when the consequences of rampant energy consumption are increasingly all around us.

2022 will be the year when the industry really starts to feel like it’s trapped between a giant pile of cash and a hard place.

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 CHINA DATA CENTRE CAPACITY China’s data centre sector is about to go into overdrive, with four mega-clusters planned in the country's north and west with the aim of supporting the data needs of Beijing and major coastal centres.

EDITOR'S CHOICE HOW DATA CENTRES CAN GROW AND REMAIN COMPETITIVE: Nick Smith, Business Development Manager at Genetec, talks about how data centres can grow DEMAND RESPONSE IN DATA CENTRES – WHAT’S HOLDING US BACK? Ed Ansett, Founder, i3 focuses on the changing data centre power game, and why power saving and achieving net zero is the foundation of all future builds.

HOW TO MEET THE IT CHALLENGES OF A HYBRID WORLD: Darren Watkins, managing director at VIRTUS Data Centres, explores the challenges (and opportunities) of an increasingly hybridised cloud landscape.

 SCALA DATA CENTERS DigitalBridget subsidiary Scala kicks off 2022 with a bang, announcing two new hyperscale data centres in Brazil - one of which is already fully leased to a “major cloud provider”.  THE IRISH GRID Ireland’s fraught relationship with its data centre industry only worsens, as scientists at the MaREI Environmental Research Institute describe the impact of data centres on Ireland’s power grid as “as a serious energy systems problem.”  META Just one week after gaining approvals to build a massive 200 MW data centre in Zeewolde, Netherlands, the Dutch senate hit pause on Meta (Facebook)’s plans for the site "until a new government vision for spatial planning and data centres is ready."

U P FEB 2022

D O W N

datacentremagazine.com

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TIMELINE

Over the last two years, sketchy details began to emerge that hinted at the construction of a colossal data centre in the sleepy Dutch community of Zeewolde.

Rumours circulated, press departments refused to comment, and the whole thing bubbled along in the background.

Until a few months ago. Then, things moved very fast indeed, with the revelation that cloud giant Meta (Facebook) was behind the

July 2020 A Shadow Looms Over Zeewolde Reporters working for a Dutch paper reveal that an unnamed, clandestine US tech firm is making “offers you can’t refuse” to local farmers, buying up vast tracts of land. A German power company also reveals that they’ve been contracted for enough power to support a 200 MW data centre. Facebook’s involvement is suspected, but official comment is in no way forthcoming.

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February 2022

site, which was slated to begin construction immediately. Now, nothing is moving at all, as the project is mired in the approvals process once again.

This is our breakdown of the, uh, breakdown of the Meta Zeewolde project.

Feb 2021 Conquering the Council Plans presented to local government authorities reveal that the proposed hyperscale data centre will have a minimum size of 175,000-250,000 sq m (1,884,0002,700,000 sq ft), and will primarily rely on air cooling. A local alderman claims the project will create 410 jobs. Facebook’s involvement remains unconfirmed.

Nov 2021

Dec 2021

Meta Revealed

Goliath…

The newly re-branded Meta officially reveals its involvement in the project, as well as the site’s planned capacity: 200 MW. Despite a ban on data centre construction in the province which went into effect in June, Meta makes the argument that, because work on the site began before the ban, it should be allowed to continue.

Despite ongoing protests from local farmers and environmental groups, the Zeewolde local government grants Meta the approvals necessary to begin construction on the site.

With a province-wide moratorium in effect, Meta’s campus has the potential to be both the largest and last data centre built in the area.

Dec 2021 … Meet David Less than a week after the highprofile approval of the project, the Dutch Senate slapped a freeze on the project, voiding Meta’s workaround for the local moratorium since a portion of the land required for the site is owned by the Central Government Real Estate Agency. As of now, the Netherlands’ biggest data centre may never make it out of the planning stage. datacentremagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

The Mother of Nigeria’s

Digital

Transformation Name: Funke Opeke Job Title: CEO & Founder Company: MainOne

F

or more than a decade, Funke Opeke has been one of the driving forces behind the development of Nigeria’s digital infrastructure and economy.

After attending and graduating from university in the US, Opeke held a number of ICT roles at leading US telecommunications and tech firms, including Verizon (where she spent several years as the company’s Executive Director of Verizon Communications Wholesale Division) for two decades before returning to Nigeria in 2005. Once home, she took a role as the Chief Technology Officer of MTN, one of the country’s leading telecom service providers.

In 2008, Opeke left MTN and founded Mainstreet Technologies (now MainOne), where she currently serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Since her return to Nigeria, she has reflected in several interviews about her longstanding desire to see the country’s digital and telecommunications infrastructure developed to a point where it would solve problems for the people of Nigeria, rather than create them. Nigeria's Internet presence is now a growing space for new international business opportunities. Opeke is often credited as having largely driven that change.

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TRAILBLAZER

Since its founding, MainOne has grown to become West Africa’s leading communications services and network solutions provider. Opeke has overseen the construction of the region’s first privately-owned, open access, 7,000 kilometer undersea high capacity submarine cable - a massive US$240-million project that was completed on schedule and on budget in 2010 - as well as the country’s largest Tier III data centre.

Opeke’s company is widely regarded as one of the most influential tech firms in Nigeria - if not West Africa as a whole.

Now, Opeke is taking MainOne to the next stage in its journey and hopefully bringing Nigeria’s digital economy along with it. In December 2021, the news broke that MainOne had been the subject of 20

February 2022

“We are critical to the digital infrastructure of West Africa”

Year appointed:

2008

Years experience:

20+

one of the largest, most high-profile acquisitions in the history of the country’s tech sector, with US data centre giant Equinix purchasing the firm for roughly US$320 million.

Despite some concerns raised over the price point versus the perceived valuation of MainOne, Opeke is vocally excited about the deal, which she says will build further upon her company’s already resoundingly successful business model. “We’re doing well, we’re having one of our best years ever. Our business is growing, responding to the challenges faced in our region. We opened a new data centre in Ghana in June of this year, we are expanding our data centre facility in Lekki and that will be open in Q1 2022,” she told reporters from TechCrunch following the announcement of the sale. “We are critical to the digital infrastructure of West Africa, no doubt, and we expect that we will continue to grow that as part of the global platform that Equinix brings. It’s a fantastic story that we can grow as part of that global platform and have access to additional investment capability, the technology and the solutions they have to offer the global customers who are increasingly wanting to do business in our region.”

For Opeke, MainOne, and Nigeria’s digital economy and infrastructure at large, the future appears to be bright.

Opeke has a first degree in Electrical Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Nigeria and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. datacentremagazine.com

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Fredrik Forslund

FIVE MINUTES WITH...

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February 2022

W

ith the data centre sector continuing to act as custodian for the world’s exponentially growing reserves of valuable data, we caught up with Fredrik Forslund, Vice President of cloud and data centre erasure solutions at Blancco and a director of the International Dat a Sanitisation Consortium (IDSC), for his expert insights into the year ahead.

» WHAT ARE THE THREE

BIGGEST DATA CENTRE TRENDS YOU’RE SEEING ON THE HORIZON FOR 2022?

First, the Global chip shortage.

The pandemic continues to wreak havoc, causing product shortages and supply chain slowdowns.

In addition, a global semiconductor shortage has impacted nearly every product that requires sensors, including cars, PCs, tablets and games consoles. Industry experts predict the chip shortage is anticipated to continue well into 2022, which will cause prices to rise.

We believe the companies that are struggling with replacing end-of-life equipment will find creative workarounds to alleviate the challenges caused

“ NO MATTER IF IT'S A PRIVATE, HYBRID OR PUBLIC CLOUD DATA CENTRE, NO DATA SHOULD EVER LEAVE A DATA CENTRE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES” by shortages, including purchasing used or remanufactured equipment and/or extending the life of existing devices with hardware warranties.

We expect that, as enterprises look to employ more sustainable models, this chip shortage will act as a catalyst for greater circular economy engagement in 2022.

In 2021, we saw companies turning to different asset classes, such as Chromebooks, to replace older equipment. We anticipate this will continue next year. We also predict more organisations will consider moving a larger percentage of their workloads to the cloud and leverage newer solutions such as virtual desktops (VDI) which allows users to run PCs in the cloud.

» VERY INTERESTING. WHAT ELSE?

Well, it’s obvious that data centres will remain the core of any infrastructure: Although we start seeing more data, apps or users datacentremagazine.com

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

outside the data centre than inside, it will continue to, and should remain the primary location of your critical information and the core of any infrastructure.

No matter if it's a private, hybrid or public cloud data centre, no data should ever leave a data centre under any circumstances.

You should also never leave data you no longer need in it, or if you do remove an asset from a data centre such as drives, you need to make sure it has been erased first.

It’s not only critical from a security perspective but from a sustainability one too.

The explosion of data means the environmental impact of storing it is only going to get greater.

According to Dr Patrick Bresnihan of National University of Ireland, Maynooth, data centres could use 70% of Ireland’s electricity by 2030.

In 2022, we therefore expect to see more data centre consolidation from a sustainability as well as a manageability and security point of view where smaller, older data centres will be migrated into more modern and energy-efficient ones.

» SPEAKING OF

SUSTAINABILITY, ANYTHING ELSE TO ADD ON THAT FRONT?

2022 is the year when enterprises go from sustainability rule breakers to rule makers.

Tackling the climate crisis is now a global imperative for all enterprises. The COP26 climate conference made some progress on addressing climate change, with the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact to consign the use of coal to history.

However, we are still some way off in achieving the target of limiting

“ E-WASTE HAS GONE QUIETLY UNDER THE RADAR FOR TOO MANY YEARS” 24

February 2022

Vice President of Cloud and Data Centre Erasure at Blancco, Forslund brings over 15 years of experience in IT security to the role. He previously founded SafeIT, a security software company focusing on encryption and selective data erasure

the global temperature rise to 1.5C. In 2022, we will see enterprises set clear plans and outline strategies for how they are doing more to prevent climate change.

Enterprises will become rule makers, setting a precedent for more sustainable, greener business operations, with net zero pledges and greater engagement with the circular economy.

Enterprises will start to interrogate their practices at every level to understand how they can go carbon

neutral and reduce their impact on the environment. IT will play a critical role in driving this change, through the circular economy and by encouraging the reuse and refurbishment of IT equipment to minimise the environmental impact of the manufacturing of devices and electronics.

E-waste has gone quietly under the radar for too many years, and in 2022, addressing this now fastest growing global waste stream will become an enterprise priority. datacentremagazine.com

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DISCOVER WHO MADE THE CUT. Top 100 Companies in Technology Read Now

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Creating Digital Communities

NTT

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February 2022

NTT

BUILD-TO-SUIT DATA CENTRES OFFER CUSTOMISED SOLUTIONS WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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NTT

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February 2022

NTT

US$11bn

Combined Revenue

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Companies Coming Together

40,000

Number of Employees Worldwide

57

Countries Creating a New Global Footprint Across Five Continents

US$3.6bn

NTT Group annual average investments in R&D for the next five years

2000

Year Founded

NTT Global Data Centers Americas spotlights their new Phoenix data centre in Arizona designed to deliver scalable power configurations for its clients

R

ising from the heat of the Arizona desert is a vast campus which has been designed to be flexible and scalable for clients of NTT Global Data Centers Americas. The 102-acre campus is taking shape in the form of NTT Phoenix PH1 - the first of seven planned data centres on the site.

Historically, the Phoenix economy was known for its ‘Five C’s’ - cotton, cattle, citrus, climate, and copper, but with the arrival of these data centres, aptly located on the Elliot Road Technology Corridor, 30 minutes from the city’s Sky Harbor International Airport, another C will be joining the list - connectivity.

NTT Global Data Centers Americas (NTT) was quick to seize the opportunity of creating their latest campus in the desert landscape, allowing them the luxury of space, which will benefit their clients seeking a scalable site - especially those on the west coast looking for a new location.

“The new campus has substantial expansion capability which will enable us to build out and benefit our clients,” said Brittany Miller, VP Design, Construction and Supply Chain at NTT Global Data Centers Americas who lives 20 minutes from the campus and watched with interest as her first campus project with NTT rose from the desert dust.

“Our build-to-suit design responds to client specific requirements for data centre builds. It's not a one size fits all anymore being able to adapt and rapidly implement datacentremagazine.com

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NTT

“ Our build-to-suit designs respond to what clients need from their data centre builds. It's not a one size fits all anymore - being able to adapt and rapidly implement is where I see NTT leading the pack” BRITTANY MILLER

VP DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY CHAIN AT NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

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February 2022

is where I see NTT leading the pack,” said Miller who leads the construction and supply chain team for NTT Americas in all their infrastructure builds.

Global neutral operator The global company, which is a carrier neutral operator offering access to multiple cloud providers, enjoys a large footprint with locations in North America, Europe, Africa and India. Clients from Phoenix to Mumbai benefit from NTT’s tailored infrastructure and experience consistent best practices in design and operations across all their scalable and customisable data centres.

Global Data Centers Americas was originally founded in 2000 under the name RagingWire. “In (add year) NTT also incorporated DPA, e-shelter, Gyron, Netmagic, NTT Communications Nexcenter,

NTT

BRITTANY MILLER TITLE: VP DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY CHAIN LOCATION: SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA Brittany Miller, Vice President of Design, Construction and Supply Chain at NTT Global Data Centers Americas, leads new data centre construction projects which feature global industry standards, multi-story buildings, and massive capacity.

Prior to joining NTT, Miller spent four years leading teams in Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation business unit. She led a team that was responsible for global program management and governance along with AMER lease execution.

Miller also held multiple positions at Intel over her 10-year tenure. She led a global team of supply chain professionals from setting construction delivery strategy through the execution of large-scale construction projects.

Build-to-suit data centre design Miller is keen to focus on NTT’s first data centre on the Phoenix campus which is due to open in February 2022 which has been built with a capability to expand.

She pointed out why NTT selected Phoenix as a safe site for the campus as the market offers reliable and affordable power, a low risk for natural disasters, a robust fibre network, connectivity to leading cloud providers, and comprehensive tax incentives.

EXECUTIVE BIO

to form the global data centres division. In 2019, NTT began the process of integrating the companies into a single division globally.

Today, the company is the world’s third largest data centre provider by IDC in their Colocation and Interconnection Services MarketScape report. NTT extends to more than 20 countries with a total of 500,000 sqm of server space.

Ryan

Global Director, Mission Critical North America

Tony

Pei Shi

Associate Director of Marketing China

Associate Director, Sales & Service Southeast Asia

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Kohler: supplying NTT’s customer needs Kohler provides generators for NTT and helps them meet the needs of their customers, explains the company’s Engineering Solutions Manager, Lori Domaschk Originally founded by the Kohler family as a manufacturer of farm implements, Kohler has been operational since 1873. Fast-forward more than a century and in 2008, the family set up and entered a partnership to work on large diesel generators. They continued on this journey before launching their own KD series of generators. Lori Domaschk, Engineering Solutions Manager of Kohler’s data centre business, said the KD Series created the company’s newfound “strong focus” on the data centre industry.

“Now Kohler provides a wide range of generators of up to 4MW which allows for greater flexibility in design as well as business direction,” Lori said.

Kohler is becoming increasingly more involved with large builds and hyperscalers, the needs of which are somewhat varied and require the customization, collaboration, and partnership that Kohler can offer. “At Kohler, we’re really able to take those concerns - anything that we want to change or modify and we have a lot more control over them,” Lori said.

Partnering with NTT As a provider of generators with enclosures, Kohler’s relationship with NTT is closely knit.

“The best way to explain the partnership that we have with them, besides just being another supplier to them, is making sure that they are meeting the needs of their customers. So we have daily, weekly meetings with their team and with the procurement team to make sure that deadlines are getting hit; that they’re able to build in the way that they need in order to meet their own customer needs,” Lori said.

Looking to the future, Lori describes Kohler’s growth goals as aggressive. “I would say COVID has intensified the need and the speed for growth in the data centre industry. For us, there are extensive growth plans, and we’re continuing to build and expand our data centre team to meet these growth goals and growth needs,” she said.

Learn more

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NTT

“ NTT has grown exponentially, this gives clients the convenience of coming to one provider” BRITTANY MILLER

VP DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY CHAIN AT NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

SNAPSHOT OF PHOENIX, ARIZONA Located in the south-west of the US, Phoenix, Arizona is the largest state capital with a population 1.6 million and lies only 150 miles from the Mexican border at Sonoyta.

Its canal system led to a thriving farming community. Cotton, cattle, citrus, climate, and copper were known locally as the "Five C's" anchoring Phoenix's economy. These remained until after World War II, when high-tech companies began to move into the valley.

In April 2021, Arizona adopted updated tax incentives for data centres.

The bill extends tax breaks for an additional 10 years, through 2033. It also expands tax exemptions related to data centre equipment.

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February 2022

NTT

“The campus is phenomenal,” said Miller, who is also responsible for the global construction and supply chain standardisation.

“I live in Arizona, so I've seen this project rise from the sand into a vast building in the desert - I think this shows why I love construction as I can see all the hard work of the teams showing in the bricks and mortar of a data centre building.

“We’re focusing on the build-to-suit concept as another channel for customers.

NTT has the ability to expand quickly with partners and build to their requirements which is becoming more important for larger customers. We are leveraging our internal expertise to build and design exactly what they need,” said Miller, who pointed out her team has the “knowledge and capability” to understand what a client is looking for.

“In terms of sustainability in construction and engineering, we’re always looking at ways to make our data centres more energy efficient, using renewables in certain regions and always looking at sustainable data centre standards like LEED.” Miller leads a unique team of diverse talent During the past year Miller and NTT have invested in a diverse engineering and construction team that is focused on the customer perspective and requirements.

“My team has diverse talent from Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft and this allows us to understand the client perspective and deliver to those requirements.”

Part of Miller’s team is Toby Stapleton, Director of Business Operations Construction, Critical Facilities Engineering & Design, who has 20 years of experience in the mission critical and data centre space. datacentremagazine.com

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NTT

He pointed out why NTT’s build-to-suit approach is unique. “I think our most unique qualities that set us apart are our team’s speed, flexibility and agility to react to client needs in the way that they are used to within their own organisations. This goes a long way with the stakeholders as that level of trust is needed especially with the significance of the builds we are being entrusted to deliver,” said Stapleton.

“Having been on the owner's side as with many of my colleagues here at NTT, we know in depth what our client partners go through on a daily basis. Building off our experience is key in that initial engagement, the trust is achieved quickly, a hyperscale approach is assumed and communicated early on, and this allows our customers to get into eliminating risk day one with a sense of certainty on deliverables,” he said.

Dylan Borvansky, Director of Preconstruction, previously worked for large hyperscale clients, and with this wealth of experience on a global stage, he was able to see first-hand the challenges these large companies have and worked directly with them to create cost effective solutions to enable data centre build portfolio success.

“This exposure to a multitude of designs from globally recognised teams has encouraged me and my team to always present the options as there are multiple ways to deliver projects,” he said.

Commenting on how that experience better positions NTT to deliver build-to-suit projects he said: “I understand, as do many in our industry, that it is hard to remove internal legacy design elements. By working with the NTT team with a focus on providing the best quality, cost optimised and on-schedule projects, our customers are able to tap into that arsenal of information and ways to do it better with the data to back it up.

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NTT

“ My team has diverse talent from Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft and this allows us to understand what the client really needs in terms of what we're building and cater to those requirements” BRITTANY MILLER

VP DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY CHAIN AT NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

SIX OTHER NTT CAMPUSES IN THE US Sacramento Located in seismically-stable Sacramento.

The CA1/CA2/CA3 combined data centre campus is the largest in California with 53 MW of critical IT load. It features 100% renewable energy and 24x7 staff.

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley SV1 Data Center in California is strategically located in the heart of the tech capital of the world. With 16 MW of critical IT load the centre provides scale and a rich ecosystem of connectivity options.

This facility is the first in Santa Clara to use an earthquake-resistant design featuring an innovative base isolation system.

Ashburn The 78-acre fenced campus at Ashburn, Virginia data centres are located outside Washington DC in the heart of "Data Center Alley" which contains one of the largest fibre carrier densities around. More than 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through the region's digital ecosystem. The newest data centre on the campus, Ashburn VA5, offers 32MW of critical IT load and is the fifth of nine planned data centres.

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Chicago Located on a 19-acre data centre campus in Illinois, NTT Chicago CH1 features 36 MW of critical IT load and is the first of two planned data centers on NTT’s 72 MW campus. With high-density vaults it can support both single-user and colocation requirements of hyperscale cloud and enterprise customers.

Hillsboro The Hillsboro HI1 data centre, the first on NTT’s 126 MW Hillsboro Data Center Campus in Oregon, offers 36MW of critical IT load and Subsea Connect, a trans-pacific network service providing connectivity between Hillsboro and Tokyo, Japan using NTT’s Pacific (PC-1) Subsea Cable System.

Dallas Dallas TX1 Data Center in Texas has been recognised by Datacenter Dynamics as one of the “most beautiful data centres in the world”. With a total of 230,000 sq ft and 16 MW of critical IT load, Dallas TX1 has waterless cooling using indirect air exchange cooling technology.

NTT

“Each company that is interested in a build-to-suit has their own unique challenges. Our approach is to provide the flexibility to partner with our clients to find a resolution in a timely manner.

Our team is unique as is our approach, and our clients realise early on that the lasting relationships formed are reciprocally beneficial.”

NTT Phoenix PH1 Data Centre When the new build-to-suit data centre, Phoenix PH1, opens its clients will benefit from tailored infrastructure and experience consistent best practices in design and operations across all the scalable and customisable data centres.

The features of the data centre includes: • Two-story data centre designed to LEEDcertified specifications for minimum water usage and maximum energy conservation,

and featuring a reinforced concrete slab floor design that increases floor loading and variable rack densities • 36MW of critical IT load, N+1 distributed redundancy for each 6MW vault, diverse power distribution to data hall, and dedicated on-site sub-station • Air-cooled chillers with airside economisers and fan coil wall cooling design with hot aisle containment • Three diverse fibre entry points and two Meet-Me-Rooms to provide access to multiple leading cloud providers, along with global and regional carriers and ISPs offering dark and lit services • 24x7 security and facility operations team Miller points out the new scalable campus will enable enterprises to meet strategic business objectives - by accelerating time to market, improving operating efficiency and avoiding costly downtime.

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NTT

Overcoming supply chain challenges Starting at the height of the pandemic brought many challenges for Miller - the main one being supply chain but partnering with suppliers has helped her overcome this major stumbling block.

“Supply chain is one of the largest challenges in the past year, but by partnering with our suppliers we have done a really good job mitigating risks. Without the partnership of our suppliers and risk mitigation measures , we wouldn't have been able to deliver on our commitments this year.”

Partnership with Kohler Miller pointed out Kohler as being one of NTT’s most important partners.

“Globally they have been instrumental in helping with some of the supply chain 42

February 2022

“ We’re focusing on the build-to-suit concept as we own a lot of land and have the ability to expand quickly with a partner and build to their requirements which is becoming more important for larger customers” BRITTANY MILLER

VP DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY CHAIN AT NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

NTT

issues we've had in the past. We're working through a lot of first-of-the-kind with them to shorten the lead times and ensure equipment for generators are delivered on time. This has been a longstanding relationship and Kohler is definitely one of our key suppliers, especially in the US.” Expansion to benefit hyperscalers During the past few years NTT has expanded its global footprint and will continue to do so over the next 18 months, when they'll increase by 20%. Miller commented on how this will benefit hyperscalers around the world.

“NTT has grown exponentially, this gives clients the convenience of coming to one provider. By having one NTT and the rapid expansion that we've seen in the last couple of years, we'll offer them the ability to have

one provider and one service globally which will simplify their business model. We've expanded into places that are very desirable to some of our clients so I also think this interconnection will help.

“Our build-to-suit designs respond to what clients need from their data centre builds. It's not a one size fits all and being able to adapt and quickly implement is where I see NTT leading the pack.”

Commenting on how NTT will continue to retain its leading market position, Miller said it was based on continuing to partner with their clients and expand further into the markets along with their focus on build-to-suit.

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DATA CENTRES

WHAT DOES 2022 HAVE IN STORE FOR THE DATA CENTRE INDUSTRY? From cold storage and going green to the role of colocation, experts from the industry share their insights into what the next year holds for the sector WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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A

s we enter 2022, the decade is increasingly shaping up to be a pivotal one for the data centre industry. The world - driven to embrace remote work en mass, disrupted, and digitalised - enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Milestone technologies like 5G, edge computing, and the Internet of Things, continue to place greater and greater demands upon our ability to capture, store, transfer, and analyse data. And the effects of the climate crisis, felt more keenly than ever, are driving seismic change throughout every industry.

Increasingly, the data centre industry finds itself as both the bedrock of the modern world, and at the forefront of fast-acting change required to preserve it. In order to get a better idea of how exactly the various megatrends defining the decade so far will affect the data centre industry in 2022, I tracked down experts from some of the world’s leading data centre operators to get their opinions and predictions for the year to come.

The end of colocation?

The past two years have seen an intriguing trend in the architecture of data centre fabrics. Just as the decade before saw the slow (if somewhat exaggerated) demise of the on-premises data centre, the rise of the hyperscale data centre segment, as datacentremagazine.com

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DATA CENTRES

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“Colocation still has a role to play in the data centre sector” IAN COTTINGHAM SALES DIRECTOR, BT WHOLESALE

well as rapid growth at the edge, has been suggested to be pushing colocation sites, or carrier hotels, towards extinction.

In November of 2020, Colt DCS even announced plans to sell off 12 of its colocation data centres in Europe in order to focus its efforts on the hyperscale section of the market. “Demand for data storage and cloud capabilities has never been higher, and so is the need for businesses to scale and find capacity. By restructuring and focusing on our hyperscale facilities, we can meet our customers' needs on demand with true scalability and efficiency, while meeting their sustainability targets" said Niclas Sanfridsson, CEO of Colt DCS at the time.

Obviously, colocation facilities aren’t disappearing, and won’t do so any time soon. But the way in which they’re treated by their operators and the customers that use them could see colocation data centres functionally become extensions of the edge, rather than a middle ground.

Are we headed for a future where everything is either a hyperscale facility or part of the edge?

“If we were talking 10 years ago, we'd be talking quite generally about a ‘data centre’; now, we can't have that same simplified conversation,” explained Robert Davidson, Director of International Operations at Digital Realty when I interviewed him back in 2021 . Traditionally, data centres were as Davidson put it - just ‘data centres’: enterprise colocation facilities that resided within a city’s central business district. datacentremagazine.com

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DATA CENTRES

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

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

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

With this bifurcation of the industry towards one of two extremes (Davidson told me that Digital Realty is already repurposing an older carrier hotel it owns in Hong Kong into a facility better suited to operating at the edge of the network) is the middle-ground “just-a-data-centre” that Davidson recalled set to disappear?

Ian Cottingham, Wholesale Specialist Director at BT Wholesale, still thinks the death of colocation is being greatly exaggerated, however. “Colocation still has a role to play in the data centre sector because it offers high-availability and a cost-effective alternative to on-premises data centres,” he stressed. As business requirements increase the demand for data-heavy applications, colocation services can ensure that highbandwidth connectivity is always available from highly secure locations with redundant power suppliers which are close to where it’s actually needed.

“Otherwise, it’s akin to continuously shuttling a delivery van between a central warehouse and various, wide-spread locations for each delivery,” Cottingham said.

“It’ll take a long time and it’s expensive. If there are various decentralised warehouses closer to customers for the van to pick up stock, the whole process will be more 48

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“ Despite the shift for some operators away from colocation, they will remain a reliable middle-ground” IAN COTTINGHAM SALES DIRECTOR, BT WHOLESALE

efficient. That’s why, despite the shift for some operators away from colocation, they will remain a reliable middle-ground between on-premises data centres and cloudbased offerings.” Whether or not colocation data centres will be (or have already been) absorbed into the edge either remains to be seen, or is perhaps just a matter of semantics.

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“ With employees operating from multiple different locations, critical and confidential data can no longer be stored on-premises in one site” DAVIDE VILLA

DIRECTOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EMEAI, WESTERN DIGITAL

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THE RISE OF COLD STORAGE AND THE COMPLICATIONS OF DATA SOVEREIGNTY EXPERT INSIGHTS FROM DAVIDE VILLA, DIRECTOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EMEAI AT WESTERN DIGITAL “Hybrid working is here to stay: 52% of UK workers are expected to be remote in 2022. This has brought up a new challenge for enterprises: with employees operating from multiple different locations, critical and confidential data can no longer be stored on-premises in one site. For data to be accessed and protected at these various locations, enterprises must deploy local, external and cloud back-ups, and archival solutions.

Archival data (also known as ‘cold’ storage) is stored in lower cost, infrequently accessed tiers that archive information until it is needed, for example in the event of a failure or cyber-attack. As the world generates and stores more archival data than ever before, with use cases such as genomics or video footage, cold storage will

become the go to for data which must be protected but doesn’t need to be accessed within milliseconds. As enterprises start to run back-ups two or three times in various locations, the amount of storage in data centres will further build up and require a serious look at the way organisations archive their data.

The prominence of archival data also tackles the ever-present issue of ransomware attacks and prevents them from becoming far less impactful if you can access backups of stolen or corrupted information.

The same principle applies in the cases of floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather incidents that are occurring with higher frequency worldwide. This data, which isn’t needed actively, can be stored in pools of cooler storage at a lower cost.”

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DATA CENTRES

A GREENER INDUSTRY EXPERT INSIGHTS FROM FABRIZIO GARRONE, ARUBA’S REPRESENTATIVE ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF CLIMATE NEUTRAL DATA CENTRE PACT “COP26 represents a new era of ambition for the world and also the data centre industry, as the sector continues to take steps towards becoming more sustainable and green efficient. Environmental issues continue to dominate the public discourse, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As remote working has become the norm, even more organisations are now relying on outsourced data centre services and cloud computing to support their everyday operations.

As an industry, we need to work together, especially through initiatives like the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, to provide customers with solutions that ultimately lower their operations’ impact on the environment - such as geothermal and photovoltaic systems. It’s only then we’ll see measures that will prioritise protecting the environment and offer true green options that will allow us to carry on with our way of doing business and at the same time, protect the world we live in.”

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“ COP26 represents a new era of ambition for the world and also the data centre industry” FABRIZIO GARRONE

ENTERPRISE SOLUTION DIRECTOR, ARUBA

A data-driven future The data centre industry faces as many challenges as it does opportunities, from handling an ever-increasing amount of information, to a skills shortage, and the ever-present spectre of climate catastrophe. However, the world in which we live is one that is increasingly dependent on a strong data centre industry. Fredrik Forslund, VP of cloud and data centre erasure solutions at Blancco, is confident that “although we start seeing more data, apps or users outside the data centre than inside, it will continue to, and should remain the primary location of your critical information and the core of any infrastructure. No matter if it's a private, hybrid or public cloud data centre, no data should ever leave a data centre under any circumstances.”

Simply put, data centres are a nonnegotiable reality of a functional modern world. Now, the industry needs to rise to that challenge. datacentremagazine.com

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SUNRISE | UPC

MORE WOW TOGETHER! WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE 54

February 2022

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY AND LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Perfect partners Sunrise UPC converge 5G technology and the best gigabit broadband network to become the national champion in Switzerland

T

he drive to be Switzerland’s top telecommunications company and ‘national champion’ is within touching distance for Sunrise UPC — who count tennis legend Roger Federer as one of their brand ambassadors — and are the new partner of the Swiss-Ski team as they prepare for the Olympics.

Seeded two is no longer an option for Sunrise UPC. The company is one step closer to becoming the leader for communications and entertainment in the country following the epic merger in 2020 when 5G technology from Sunrise converged with the best gigabit broadband network in the form of UPC. “Together more Wow” is what the customers of Sunrise UPC are now promised

by Fabio Pellegrino, Senior Director, Platform Delivery, who describes himself as “not your traditional IT guy” as he comes from a background in customer care, which gives him first-hand knowledge of providing a first-class customer experience.

“I am able to bring emotional intelligence to my role in IT and like to use technology as an enabler for our customers to have the best experience. IT is all about the customer experience nowadays,” said Pellegrino from his office in Zurich.

Pellegrino is excited by the potential power of the two companies coming together, which he says will offer “intelligent connectivity of the future”. In one of the largest mergers of two companies in recent

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Fabio Pellegrino Senior Director Platform Delivery, Sunrise UPC

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“ Sunrise UPC offers 360° communication solutions for the digital, mobile, and secure workplace.

5G and IoT solutions increase the agility, innovative strength, and productivity of companies” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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Swiss history, Sunrise and UPC are now perfectly placed to meet the changing habits of their customers, who have adopted hybrid working due to the pandemic, and offer even more business power to the selfemployed, SMEs and large-scale companies.

“The combination of Sunrise and UPC will give our customers a greater ‘Wow’ experience,” said Pellegrino. “We bring together the passion and technology of two companies and are now competing for the number one slot in Switzerland. We will grow together and offer a good price tag and technology to be the national champion.

“Together, more speed and entertainment. Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest 5G

SUNRISE | UPC

FABIO PELLEGRINO TITLE: S ENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY LOCATION: ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

network from Sunrise and the reliable UPC Giganet,” he said.

Liberty Global acquired Sunrise in November 2020 for a reported US$7.4bn in order to create a stronger challenge to incumbent Swisscom.

The company focuses on innovation, untethered connectivity, personalised entertainment, and digitisation. It offers a wide range of broadband, TV, mobile, and telephony services to its two million customers. This includes an extensive range of TV channels, seven days of replay, and thousands of films and series available on-demand plus the MySports (www. mysports.ch) channel and online platform esports.ch which offer the best sports entertainment.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Fabio Pellegrino started his career, next to his studies, supporting the end customers in customer care. During the years, he has led customer care support and moved to IT, developing system integration in the BSS stack and ending up leading the development from an end-to-end perspective.

As a doer, he achieved an honest leadership style, using his emotional intelligence in relationships with national and international leaders that enabled him to speak at Dreamforce 2019. During the merger between Sunrise and UPC he led a full IT organisation achieving the promised benefits. Pellegrino is married and has a son.

SUNRISE | UPC

Sunrise UPC is continuing to expand the next-generation network structure, including 5G and future technologies, to be able to supply up to 90% of Swiss households with gigabit internet during 2021. The speed will gradually be increased to 10 Gbit/s.

With entertainment offers, the combined business is providing a winning combination.

Focus on platform delivery “My role as CIO of platform delivery is to focus on the development and run of the main platforms like CRM, billing, service delivery, network inventory, middleware,

1931

Year Founded

Telecom Industry

3,000

Number of Employees

762.5m Revenue CHF

2020

Sunrise merge with UPC

10 year

Partnership deal with national Swiss-Ski team

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provisioning in the field and in general, operations of the major applications in B2B and B2C,” commented Pellegrino.

“Even if today, the customer experience is supported through the webstack, it needs a reliable backend that can offer capability in real-time to support customers initiated processes. For this, there are reliable and fast systems needed that can provide the relevant information in the surrounding systems.”

Pellegrino outlined his role in platform delivery — which is the biggest department in CIO of Sunrise UPC — and how he focuses on the stacks of B2B and B2C. “During the

merger, my role was to safeguard the UPC IT department overall as we had to achieve the set end-of-year targets. A merger brings immediately the wish to align, and to discuss the future, but the duty of achieving the revenue remains.

“The market is highly competitive and we have seen that the concurrence was launching attractive promotions — assuming we would be fully occupied with the setup of the merger. With me ‘left behind’ we were able to give a clear response and achieved the target, next to the big effort of my colleagues to set up the merger.

“ We bring together the passion and technology of two companies and are now competing for the number one slot in Switzerland.

We will grow together and offer a good price tag and technology to be the national champion” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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A good example of this are software-as-a-service offerings. These cloud-based services have changed the game with fully managed, supported, scalable solutions at a fraction of the cost.

It‘s critical to understand the strategic landscape and leverage these offerings as much as possible to reduce costs and avoid redundant overhead in replicating these widely available resources internally.

Let’s explore the benefits of these resources using web development as an example.

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Jamstack is a modern web development architecture. „JAM“ stands for Javascript, APIs and markup.

It utilizes software-as-a-service as part of the architecture. twim is an official partner of Netlify, a complete cloud platform for Jamstack, which provides a built-in content delivery network for optimal performance, and an official partner of Storyblok, a headless CMS that offers highly interoperable web APIs. The Jamstack architecture is already being

used in many projects.

Marketing and corporate sites, landing pages and campaigns, high traffic sites and user portals are just a few examples of projects that have been implemented.

Companies that have successfully developed large-scale Jamstack projects and replaced their legacy technologies include SunriseUPC, Danone, Nike, Mailchimp and many more.

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SUNRISE | UPC

“At the beginning of 2021, we took the time to think about the future and what functions we would need in this special situation and it was clear that we need, next to the classic departments, a strong architecture and partner management.

To be able to give the focus on customer journeys, the capability of digital was set up as an own department — strongly collaborating with platform delivery.

“You probably think that this could be a problem, mainly if you think about the delivery cycle, as the digital departments are fully agile and platforms are going with bigger releases, and you are right. This difference in delivering, that we had to overcome, was changing the cycles and in giving slots, so that we can accommodate all the wishes coming up,” said Pellegrino.

He highlighted the challenges of the merger during the pandemic and how they used technology for colleagues to work from home. “The homework policy was introduced at the same time as the new organisation was being set up and we ended up working with leads only through technical channels and web conferences.

“Without having the opportunity to read the body language, or to even get to know each other, the main key was the clear communication and listening was crucial during this very challenging period for both our employees and customers,” he said.

“Next to the difficulties of having a lot of new systems from one day to another, it was also key to understand the new culture along with the emotional intelligence.”

“ Together, more speed and entertainment.

Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest and most reliable 5G network from Sunrise and Switzerland’s leading gigabit fibre optic cable network” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

Customer experience In the past, the main interaction between customers and Sunrise UPC was through phone or shops but the customer experience and expectation has changed. datacentremagazine.com

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POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS

Pellegrino outlined the importance of their partnership with the following:

“ To achieve those targets there is the need to use existing know-how through our partners. Our philosophy is to keep the knowledge in the company and leverage the effects of our partners who are the experts in what they do. This leaves us to focus on what we do best”

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TWIM

“Accenture helped in various areas, focusing on the end-to-end approach on the deliveries. From architecture until the release management, all the functions have been supported by them, so also design, delivery, testing and release. As we decided to introduce Salesforce in the B2B landscape, they helped us to implement the full suite in only 15 months, which I mentioned also at dreamforce. Currently, they are driving the unification of the two salesforce instances.”

“With our innovative partner twim, we replaced our B2B website, from an on-promise instance to a cloud-based solution where we used the latest and greatest innovative CMS systems. What started as a POC changed into the solution based on the advanced functionality and stability.”

CLOUDSENSE

“Prodapt is a true partner in all the delivery skills and testing, providing best-in-class knowledge, including shift left approaches and development skills. Through this, Prodapt established a great partnership with our motherhouse LGI and is providing a lot of innovative services, also in the mobile sector.”

“CloudSense is a true partner in understanding the needs of their customers.

By providing the CPQ in Salesforce, we went on a journey with them as they allowed us to contribute to their product roadmap and participate in their innovation.”

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PRODAPT SOLUTIONS LTD

SUNRISE | UPC

NETCRACKER

INFOSYS

“In the cable industry, the topology and inventory of your network and end customer devices are key. That’s why we collaborate with Netcracker as it gives us the insights of our network with ease to use, driving the upgrades of the platform so that we can use the latest and greatest in this area.”

“Over the years we have been working with Infosys that is helping us in various areas like development of the web capabilities, like e-commerce and omnichannel approaches.

Through their size they can give answers to any demand from our side, like architecture, development, operations and therefore became a strategic partner of us and LGI.”

Pellegrino concluded:

“ We want to rely on the experience and the capability of the partners by having the internals in the driving seat. This allows us to focus on the target by introducing the best- in-class application. I’m explicitly talking about partners and not vendors because this is only possible once you involve them in what you want to achieve.

All of our partners are part of the journey and solution. By bringing the best they have, we at Sunrise UPC, we can achieve the expectation of the market. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel but

use the wheel to build an astonishing sports car for the race” inally, with Federer on their bench as F the ultimate doubles partner, it won’t be long before it’s game, set and match to Sunrise UPC as they take their place as the ‘national champion’ in the Swiss telco market.

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“ I am able to bring emotional intelligence to my role in IT and like to use technology as an enabler for our customers to have the best experience” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

“Looking at the millennials, but also at the general expectation, the customer wants to be free and not attached to any opening hours or printout of documents,” commented Pellegrino.

“Today, the customer wants to have everything at his/her fingertips and be able to change subscriptions at any time.

Through the real-time capabilities, we enable a customer to watch the main football match when they want by clicking in our app, and to find the charge on the next bill. Also, the consumption of content needs to be tailored to the expectation of the customers: Having a ‘second roomsolution’ where you can continue to watch your movie in the exact same second as in the living room, is basic today.

“Our customers want to be device independent so that they can continue even on their mobile phones. This is where our 5G network comes into play. Having a strong infrastructure and tremendous speed will allow us to consume seamless

WOW! SKI SPONSORSHIP Sunrise UPC will be joining the Swiss snowsports family as the new, main Swiss-Ski partner as of the 2022/23 season for the next 10 years.

The collaboration with Sunrise UPC in the next Olympic cycle and beyond marks a further milestone in Swiss-Ski history. The new, main partner offers the umbrella association of Swiss snowsports a comprehensive package and excellent planning certainty due to the long-term nature of the engagement.

Urs Lehmann, President of SwissSki said: “Sunrise UPC will provide us with fresh impetus in various areas.

We're looking forward to these new opportunities.”

André Krause, CEO of Sunrise UPC, added: “This partnership is enabling us to continue building on our success.

Snowsports are part of the Swiss tradition and the combination with world-class performance sports fits perfectly with our positioning.

“Thanks to the partnership with SwissSki, we can anchor our company even closer and more emotionally with our customers. Sport is an ideal medium for us to do this as it shows our values passionate, bold and one.

“We've been able to build on this image even more by expanding from our partnership with Roger Federer to now also include Swiss snowsports.”

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We help our clients navigate their digital transformation journey in an age of constant disruption Today’s top organizations are constantly seeking an edge to stay competitive, win new markets and create shareholder value. And with an influx of new digital innovations permeating our world at a rapid pace, we realize the task for today’s business leaders is as great of a challenge as ever.

We help top leadership to: › Plan and navigate their digital journey forward › Uncover opportunities and hidden ROI for the business case › Create innovations and new capabilities that can scale › Drive sustainable success across the enterprise To learn more, visit InfosysConsultingInsights.com

Infosys Consulting is a global management consulting firm helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands transform and innovate. Our consultants are industry experts that lead complex change agendas driven by disruptive technology. With offices in 20 countries and backed by the power of the global Infosys brand, our teams help the C-suite navigate today’s digital landscape to win market share and create shareholder value for lasting competitive advantage. To see our ideas in action, or to join a new type of consulting firm, visit us at www.InfosysConsultingInsights.com.

Infosys Consulting. All rights reserved 2020.

SUNRISE | UPC

Sunrise UPC: More Wow together!

“In the end IT is all about customer experience nowadays” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

amounts of content both during the pandemic and into the future where we expect new models of working, focusing on output and not time presence.

“This behaviour is also valid for business customers. From the SOHO to the large enterprises where they want to use the services in real time, make adaptations and also add on services in real time, like security options. The option of doing this through the cloud is not far away.

“Everything that I mentioned sounds great, but it also has another side of the medal.

By providing those services, a lot of data is transferred from one system to the other.

This requires an adequate data-privacy and security concept, especially when we are talking about personalised data. The Telco Act in Switzerland is very specific here and relevant for our business customers where security of data is the main promise — we offer all those solutions,” he said. datacentremagazine.com

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SUNRISE | UPC

“ Through the real time capabilities, we enable a customer to watch the main football match when they want by clicking in our app and to find the charge on the next bill” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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LIFE OUTSIDE THE OFFICE What is your ‘Wow moment’?

The moment I heard that Sunrise UPC is going to be sponsoring the Swiss Ski Team - this is fabulous.

“Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest 5G network from Sunrise and the reliable UPC Giganet.”

With Sunrise UPC’s mobile and hybrid cable network, customers can do all of these things without experiencing a loss of performance.

The network has the technological advantage that it can increase the internet capacities to several Gigabits per second if needed — without any construction work being necessary — paving the way for future digital trends.

“Sunrise UPC offers 360-degree communication solutions for the digital, mobile, and secure workplace. 5G and the internet of things (IoT) solutions increase the agility, innovative strength, and productivity of companies,” he said.

He said this was a very exciting period for the company and predicted they will use technology to go beyond their traditional

Drink of choice Wine Favourite cuisine?

Spaghetti vongole Favourite holiday destination?

Florida and Sardinia Most precious possession?

My health Favourite movie?

Heat Life’s most valuable lesson?

Don’t crack under pressure – in the end you will win!

Favourite music?

Metallica

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SUNRISE | UPC

“ Together more Wow” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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SUNRISE | UPC

services. “The main key here is to adapt the platforms to be able to perform the request.

The means of any IT solution in this industry that is not selling any tangible products, that cannot put nice ribbons around its goods, cannot provide a touch and feel experience, will only make the difference when it’s reliable, fast and data consistent.

“Whatever we do, the targets consist of systems that are fast and reliable processing, ease of use, sustainable and flexible — even if we decide to sell tyres in the future, the systems should cope with that.”

Sunrise:

UPC:

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DATA CENTRE SUSTAINABILITY: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? From carbon credit greenwashing to PUE and PPAs, data centre operators’ approach to mitigating environmental impact needs to evolve WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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SUSTAINABILITY

T

he past two years have seen the data centre industry go from strength to strength. Even as other sectors have been left reeling by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, data centre operators have seen demand double and redouble, driven by increasing digitalisation, cloud, AI, and 5G adoption, and even the pandemic itself.

The growth in video conferencing, remote work, and internet traffic alone caused by the pandemic has been enough to inspire record-breaking years for data centre capacity increases, and the accelerating transition of regions like

Southeast Asia and Africa towards fully digital economies is only going to intensify this rapid evolution.

However, while data centre operators find themselves building bigger and faster than ever before, the industry labours in the shadow of a looming climate crisis. In parallel to the COVID-19 crisis, the past two years have seen apocalyptic wildfires, rising sea levels, and retreating arctic ice; grim evidence that the consequences of growthobsessed hyper capitalism are no longer urgent warnings, but facts of life for tens of millions of people.

“Many climate change ‘what ifs’ have become a reality, with reports of

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catastrophic storms, severe wildfires, intense droughts and flooding an increasingly common occurrence,” reflects Tate Cantrell, Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global a UK based high performance computing (HPC) data centre operator with an ultragreen, ultra-powerful campus in Iceland.

Cantrell, along with other experts throughout the data centre industry, is painfully aware of the paradoxical question facing data centre operators at the outset of this new decade.

How can an energy and water-hungry industry meet a decade of soaring demand while making meaningful, sustainable efforts to mitigate its destruction of the planet?

“We do not have generations with which we can make slow progress,” says Cantrell.

“We need to be progressive in our use of technologies in the data centre to give us the best chance of combating climate change now.”

“ Many climate change ‘what ifs’ have become a reality” TATE CANTRELL

CTO, VERNE GLOBAL

The Greenwashing Issue Obviously, the looming threat of the climate crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed over the past decade. Go back ten or fifteen years and operators’ attitudes towards efficiency, sourcing renewable energy, and - perhaps most notably - green messaging looked very different to today.

“Increasingly, corporations and tech giants are pledging to go carbon neutral, with companies across all sectors making bold carbon reduction commitments,” says Cantrell, in reference to sweeping industry action like the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact announced in 2020. It’s been a rare month this year that’s passed without another large scale data centre corporation announcing plans for achieving “net zero” or “carbon neutrality” by 2030, 2040, or the middle of the century. By this point, data datacentremagazine.com

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The Problem with PPAs Q: Why aren’t power purchase agreements as good in reality as they look on paper?

Max Schulz TITLE: DIRECTOR COMPANY: SUSTAINABLE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE ALLIANCE (SIDA) INDUSTRY: SUSTAINABILITY LOCATION: HAARLEM, NETHERLANDS PPAs and GoOs are both financial products. This is something that most people do not fully appreciate. There is a physical electricity system and virtual/ financial power markets. With a PPA, I buy the “output” of a wind farm over a very long contract period (e.g. 10-15 years), and with that I basically finance that wind park.

Tate Cantrell TITLE: CTO COMPANY:VERNE GLOBAL INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRES LOCATION: WASHINGTON DC, US While there are physical PPAs, like Google’s long-term agreements with power producers for renewable solar and wind power –backed by 'carbon free thermal' (nuclear) – there are also virtual PPAs, which are more of a financial vehicle, and start to tilt in the direction of greenwashing.

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However, the challenge today is actually not just building renewable power systems and making it profitable, but ensuring that the physical electricity (the electrons) actually make it into the energy system.

The constraint, e.g. in the case of the UK or NL with a lot of offshore wind, is the transport from the coastlines to the cities is still very difficult. And therefore many industries will need to relocate to where there is physical green power available; otherwise the electricity will simply never be used (as is already the case with a lot of wind and solar parks around Europe), but on paper “its all sold”.

SUSTAINABILITY

centres not “on the road to net zero” are the exception that proves the rule - something Cantell notes is largely due to the increasing unification of environmental sustainability and good financial sense.

“Sustainability efforts aren’t based on corporate altruism; they are also important for the bottom line,” he says. “This alignment between profit and social purpose will only serve to help the data centre industry drive real progress towards sustainability, creating strong incentives and the support to do so. But we should be realistic about what’s currently being achieved, and just how far we still need to go.”

To get a better idea of how much of a gap might exist between where we appear to be and how far the data centre industry might have to go, I spoke to Max Schulz, a director at the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. “At the moment, the majority of net-zero and carbon-neutral claims are based on electricity and are made ‘green’ through certificates like guarantees of origin

(GoOs) and power purchase agreements (PPAs) - buying the output of a wind park, financially,” he explains. “However we see almost no real effort to reduce the real physical impact of data centres, which includes making efforts to reduce the baseload requirements of data centres, meaning reducing the requirement of 100% available, 24/7 power, which can not

“ This alignment between profit and social purpose will only serve to help the data centre industry drive real progress towards sustainability” TATE CANTRELL

CTO, VERNE GLOBAL datacentremagazine.com

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“ It’s imperative that carbon credits aren’t used as a substitute for genuine sustainability efforts” TATE CANTRELL

CTO, VERNE GLOBAL

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physically be covered with renewable energy like wind and solar; making efforts to address the embedded carbon of server hardware, building, construction, electrical infrastructure, and backup power equipment; making efforts to remove diesel or gas-fired generators; making efforts to address water consumption in cooling-systems as well as removing cooling-fluids & gases with high global warming potential.”

Despite many claims of sustainability - claims which Schulz informs me tend to focus purely on energy efficiency, to the exclusion of the factors he mentioned above - there’s “a basic lack of transparency” in the way that environmental impact is reported. “The reporting of real measurements, such

Data Centres vs the Laws of Physics Q: How much further can we take data centre efficiency before we start bumping up against the laws of physics?

Scott Wilson TITLE: GLOBAL HEAD OF BUILDING PHYSICS & SUSTAINABILITY COMPANY: BLACK & WHITE ENGINEERING

as total power consumption or water consumption, that would be necessary to be able to verify any claims is completely lacking,” he says.

The issue is, therefore, that unless the metrics are in place to accurately judge whether or not the data centre industry is actually becoming more sustainable, it’s impossible to put pressure in the places where it’s needed to drive change. “What gets measured gets fixed,” he says matterof-factly. “Transparency of environmental data will inevitably lead to improvement, to the development of new innovations and solutions that will address the main drivers of negative environmental impact and may lead to supportive regulatory action. But without that information, change can not happen. So, it starts with transparency.”

As energy can neither be created nor destroyed, all electrical energy that enters the IT racks will become another form of energy. Namely, heat.

As the demand for data increases so does the demand for data centres. As a result, data centres are being built in less-thanideal climates where free cooling is not possible or only possible for a portion of the year. If the ambient temperature is warmer than the internal temperature work must be done to discharge that heat. While we can reduce PUEs through improved efficiencies, there will be a theoretical limit to what we can achieve, particularly in summer.

To avoid this, data centre locations need to be more carefully chosen to allow for passive/free cooling. For example, located in cold climates or close to a water source where heat can be discharged. Smart technologies can also play a part in reducing annual consumption. Through machine learning a data centre can tune a cooling system to match predicted consumption patterns and weather conditions.

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“ What gets measured gets fixed” MAX SCHULZ

DIRECTOR, SUSTAINABLE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE ALLIANCE (SDIA)

Creative Carbon Accounting Muddying the waters still further is the issue of carbon credits and offsetting. Essentially, carbon credits allow private Corporation A to pay private Corporation B a sum of money per gram, kilo, or tonne of carbon (or other pollutants) emitted into the atmosphere.

That money is then supposedly invested by Corporation B back into green initiatives, like research into carbon capture tech or planting trees. In exchange, Corporation A gets to scrub the amount of carbon it’s paid for from its balance sheet.

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While data centre operators have made some strides towards more efficient power and cooling, sourcing greener power, and using less environmentally harmful building materials, it’s rare to find a claim of reaching “net zero” emissions made in the past five years that doesn’t also bear the addendum “with the assistance of carbon credits.” And, while investment into green technologies is undoubtedly a good thing, critics of carbon credits suggest that this allows companies to rake in huge profits by acting unsustainably, and then use a portion of those revenues

SUSTAINABILITY

to greenwash their operations, while still turning a profit.

“While carbon offsetting and credits may have a role to play and can have an impact, greenwashing is still a significant problem,” says Cantrell, adding that the quality of the individual credits purchased can vary hugely. Companies making little or no effort to reduce their emissions, instead relying solely on carbon offsets of little real value, yet still claiming to be at carbon zero, pose a significant problem. “The cost of greenwashing is extremely high, and it’s imperative that

carbon credits aren’t used as a substitute for genuine sustainability efforts,” he adds.

However, Scott Wilson - Black & White Engineering’s Global Head of Building Physics and UK sustainability lead - is among those who assert the problem of carbon credits in the data centre industry is overblown. “In buildings with lower energy demands, such as commercial offices, it is often the case that it’s more economical to pay for carbon offsets to bring your building to net zero carbon than it is to make the required design changes to reduce the operational and embodied carbon,” he says. “This is not the case for data centres.”

Because of data centres’ high energy consumption, Wilson explains that it’s not economical for large-scale sites to rely on carbon credits to greenwash their energy consumption, as “even with relatively low offsets prices per tonne, the price bringing a building to net zero with credits and offsets alone could be well in excess of £1mn a year.”

It’s hard to gauge just how much revenue an individual hyperscale data centre provides, and therefore how much of a hit £1mn per hyperscale site actually represents for a large scale operator.

Just as a (very rough) calculation, however, one of the world’s largest data centre operators reported total revenues of US$1.1bn in 2020 and owns approximately 280 data centres.

It’s a facile assertion to say that each of its data centres netted the company slightly in excess of US$3.8mn, but it’s about as useful as using the fact that a data centre operator wouldn’t spend a third of its revenue per site to completely eliminate its carbon footprint to disprove the idea that using carbon offsets and credits to shave a few percent of a site’s total emissions off here and there isn’t reducing the urgency with which operators tackle going green. datacentremagazine.com

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DEMOCRATISING DATA STORAGE WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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CEPH

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CEPH

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

I

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

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

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

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

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CEPH

Title of the video

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

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

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

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

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

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

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

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

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

That democratisation, adds Craig Chadwell, VP of Product at SoftIron, creates the necessary competition (centred around the foundation itself) to push the Ceph commercial ecosystem 94

February 2022

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

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

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

CEPH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Storage is quite an interesting industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

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

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

CEPH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CEPH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CEPH

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges Enterprise storage is full of challenges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once confident with the solution, we decided

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAGE WEIL

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CLOUD & EDGE

THE EDGE IS In the face of an insatiable appetite for low-latency and high throughput connectivity, data centre operators are rethinking the concept of “the edge” WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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he amount of data that needs to be collected, moved around, processed, sent back, duplicated, stored, and otherwise manipulated in order to power our increasingly digitalised world is, frankly, staggering.

We’re increasingly faced with great big figures, like “the amount of data generated globally every day” (about 2.5 quintillion bytes and climbing, if you’re curious), which are ever spiraling upwards towards numbers the mind is fundamentally incapable of putting into context.

Not only that but, on a more granular level, the amount of data generated by

relatively small pieces of what will soon be commonplace technology, is also constantly trending upwards.

“An autonomous car’s LIDAR sensor can create over 10 Terabytes of data per day,” says Neil Stobart, VP of Global Systems Engineering at Cloudian. However, with the growth of data-intensive applications in industrial, commercial, and smart city settings, this exponential spike in data traffic is already putting undue strain on existing network infrastructure. “There is a problem with all this data being generated: the time constraints of sending data back to a remote data centre or server are no longer practical as smart infrastructures datacentremagazine.com

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Modular Design for a Diverse World eStruxture Delivers Flexibility Vertiv solutions, including the Vertiv™ Liebert® DSE economization system, allow eStruxture to bring equipment online faster and support the unique service level requirements of its customers.

Read the Case Study

CLOUD & EDGE

“ Despite this proliferation of data, only a small fraction is being used for decision making” NEIL STOBART

VP GLOBAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, CLOUDIAN

require near-instant data processing to determine the required outcome,” Stobart continues. “So despite this proliferation of data, only a small fraction is being used for decision making because the data cannot be stored or transmitted efficiently.”

Over the coming decade, this friction is only going to get worse. According

to Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index Volume 5, global interconnection bandwidth growth is forecast to reach 21,485+ terabits per second (Tbps), or 85 zettabytes, per year by 2024. In large cities - epicentres for highly digitalised economic activity and data consumption both locally and backhauled from smaller metros nearby without their own digital infrastructure - the growth in bandwidth is at its most pronounced.

“London is predicted to be the epicentre of data centre development as British tech firms in sectors such as fintech, ecommerce and digital health continue to grow at an exponential rate,” says Russell Poole, Managing Director for Equinix’s UK operations. “The city is expected to grow at a 45% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) year-onyear, contributing 1,735 Tbps by 2024.” datacentremagazine.com

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“ To better facilitate the escalating need for agile, low latency interconnection, regional markets are increasing localised capacity” RUSSELL POOLE UK MD, EQUINIX

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By the middle of the decade, the FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris) metros are forecast to account for 75% of the total interconnection bandwidth capacity in EMEA. This presents a huge challenge for data centre and network operators, as older methods of network architecture become increasingly unfit to handle the demands of a new, data-driven decade. With the ever-rising demand for lower latency connections to transmit larger and larger amounts of data, data centre operators are fundamentally reassessing their approach to the Edge.

Expert Comment: SIMON MICHIE CTO, PULSANT

The Regional Edge While regional connectivity hubs like London are set to handle an increasing amount of data over the coming decade, growth in bandwidth is far from isolated to the world’s largest metros.

Thanks to a global spike in remote and hybrid work, Poole notes that “the COVID19 pandemic has forced economies around the world into digital overdrive to adapt to a new way of doing business.

Enterprise has responded to this challenge by deploying their digital infrastructure to multiple edge locations and integrating cloud solutions into their IT framework.”

Edge computing will have a big impact on the way data centres are networked and connected. Essentially, edge computing means processing data closer to where it’s connected, so having a network of interconnected regional edge data centres is crucial.

Each data centre should be configured as a connectivity hub and all connected by an agile network, capable of delivering low latency connectivity across the length and breadth of the nation. The network should provide full route diversity around the UK to protect against any major fibre outages and ensure sufficient capacity to meet bandwidth demands today and ready for technologies such as SD-WAN. By leveraging a network of edge data centres, organisations can avoid the need for data to return to a single centralised data centre and instead spread the load across several regional hubs, reducing congestion on the network, improving latency and reducing data transaction costs.

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Expert Insight: MARK PESTRIDGE

SENIOR DIRECTOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, TELEHOUSE EUROPE It is misleading to think that the edge computing boom only presents an opportunity for smaller, local data centres to reduce latency and overcome intermittent connections.

That is not the full picture. The industry should place a greater importance on the route that data takes, not so much on its geographical home.

The number of connections in a data centre is crucial to building a connected ecosystem of partners and ensuring data travels smoothly between each of them.

Close-proximity, low-latency connectivity with vital networks and connectivity partners will be key to edge success.

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This trend, much like data growth, is only expected to grow more pronounced over the coming years.

“The past two years have seen the pandemic force many companies to digitise their business models which has further intensified the demand for digital services,” says Poole. “Companies are now making cautious preparations for a global economic recovery and as a result are implementing the expansion and deployment of digital infrastructure at a rate four times faster than pre-pandemic levels.”

Essentially, the past two years (dear lord, has it really been that long?) have seen business agility emerge as a core survival trait in successful enterprises. Ultimately, much of an enterprise’s ability to be agile is dependent on resilient, low-latency connections, and the ability to host data as close as possible to where it’s needed.

“To better facilitate the escalating need for agile, low latency interconnection, regional markets are increasing localised capacity to improve routing efficiencies and reduce latency,” Poole explains. “Data is being moved from remote locations to local carrier-neutral data centres hosting private and public Internet Exchange peering ecosystems.” By doing so, service providers are able to improve performance by lowering latency between end users and the origin of the content they access.

“Latency is significantly reduced by bringing digital services to the edge, where data and information is consumed, generated and transferred between users and applications,” Poole adds. Following where the demand leads, Equinix’s UK division is investing heavily in building regional edge data centres close to business hubs other than London, including a new Internet Exchange in Manchester.

CLOUD & EDGE

“ Latency is significantly reduced by bringing digital services to the edge, where data and information is consumed” RUSSELL POOLE UK MD, EQUINIX

Smart Cities and the Edge Data consumption growth is being driven by numerous factors, from vast networks of IoT sensors to automated vehicles.

While these technologies are already being deployed heavily throughout industrial enterprise settings, it’s the smart city which will serve as the greatest catalyst for edge demand over the coming decade.

“Smart cities have driven the adoption of edge computing with many practical applications for real-time decision-

making technology,” says Stobart. “Never before have we had so many sensors able to generate prolific amounts of data within traffic management, next-generation advertising, and innovations like smart parking.” However, legacy (and even current-generation) networks make it impossible to take full advantage of the potential of smart city technologies. The need to migrate vast amounts of data close enough to the point where it intersects with the physical world is driving intense edge data centre construction as a result.

“Smart cities are powered by real-time analytics engines sorting through mountains of sensor data and then taking action on said data,” Stobart continues. “Network

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“ The closer you can locate data to the application, the better the response time” NEIL STOBART

VP GLOBAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, CLOUDIAN

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performance has not kept up with the growth and usage of data, so the closer you can locate data to the application, the better the response time. Edge compute and storage is built upon this premise, with data sets co-located with the decisionmaking application that are in turn close to the sensors.”

This new “edge everywhere” world doesn’t mean the death of the large-scale data centre however, but rather a change in perspective. The idea that data centres can be either centralised hyperscalers, mediumsized colocation/carrier hotels, and small edge sites, is starting to feel outdated.

Going forward, it’s much more likely we’ll see a central core made up of a smaller number of much, much larger data centres.

Beyond it, everything will be the edge, and the edge will be everywhere. datacentremagazine.com

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WRITTEN BY: SAM STEERS PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Customer service at the heart of a

BOUTIQUE DATA CENTRE

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Customer service is at the heart of boutique data centre provider OpenColo’s mission to deliver industry-leading customer experiences

S

mall enough to care, but large enough to deliver. That is the motto that boutique data centre service provider OpenColo lives by, and the company ensures that this guiding principle shines through in every aspect of its operations.

Their smaller footprint means that they are able to provide excellent customer service as a number one priority. “We strive to provide the best possible customer experience when providing customer service and support to our customers,” says Jonathan Bitran, OpenColo’s Chief Operating Officer. “As we were a tenant at other data centres prior to owning our own, we took a closer look at what we liked and disliked when we needed support or service.

That helped us build the best possible customer experience team.”

Before OpenColo, the company launched in 2003 as a host of Counter Strike gaming servers under the name EGIHosting.com.

At this time, eighteen years ago, bandwidth cost around US$350 a Mbps. Discussing the origins of the company, OpenColo’s Chief Executive Officer, Sally Simkiss, reflects: “Getting started during the fallout from the dot com crash, we were determined to grow and spend in a very disciplined way. For this reason - and because of our desire to remain completely independent - we have never taken VC money and have always grown organically over the years.”

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“ Getting started during the fallout from the dot com crash, we were determined to grow and spend in a very disciplined way” SALLY SIMKISS CEO, OPENCOLO

In the beginning, OpenColo relied on other companies’ data centres for its business operations. “For the first 15 years, EGI operated out of multiple third party data centres. We found ourselves frustrated with corporate data centres’ inflexibility as well as opaque and overly complicated billing. It was hard to rapidly grow without signing long-term contacts that could prove risky for a small company like ours,” Simkiss explained.

However, with corporate data centres increasingly feeling like a bad fit, OpenColo’s owners decided it was time to take operations into their own hands. “Our founders decided that to best control our business and pricing, and meet our customers’ growing needs, we should own and operate our own data centre,” Simkiss said.

Turning this idea into reality, though, was no small task. EGI spent four years looking for the ideal location for its new facility. By the end of 2019, the company completed the design and build process of its very own site, a boutique data centre located in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That data centre operates under the brand OpenColo.

The facility was born from the conversion of a 71,000 sq ft logistics centre which, once fully transformed, housed the data centre itself and company offices.

Explaining why Santa Clara was chosen for the location, Simkiss said that it was “ideal in that the power comes from Silicon Valley Power (SVP), which is the most reliable and least expensive power in California. Additionally, our corner of Santa Clara is one of the most fibre-dense locations in the country, with dark fibre from and to almost every major provider.

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OpenColo’s 71,000 sq ft boutique data centre implements N+1 cooling, an above industry-standard 2N power redundancy to compliment our 100% uptime SLA, and a busway power delivery system for custom power configurations and faster power upgrades.

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“We have small streaming customers that pay a few dollars a month as well as large enterprise corporations. Every customer gets superior customer service” SALLY SIMKISS

CEO, OPENCOLO

to find collocation in the area ourselves, we set up the data centre with flexibility foremost in our minds.”

What is a boutique data centre and how does OpenColo differ from major providers?

OpenColo and its services are not the same as other major data centre and colocation providers. Discussing what differentiates the company from other major organisations in the industry, James Chen, VP of Sales Engineering, explained: “Around us in Santa Clara are a dozen or so other data centres, so we need to differentiate ourselves from them. As a result, we’re extremely responsive and interested in our customer’s success.”

Simkiss noted that OpenColo is a “little unusual” in that it does not have any one target customer. “We have small streaming customers that pay a few dollars a month as well as large enterprise corporations with sizeable colocation footprints in our space.

Every customer gets superior customer service. We designed our data centre for maximum flexibility in order to serve the needs of any customer,” she said.

“While there is more and more consolidation of data centre properties in datacentremagazine.com

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SCOTT BROOKSHIRE TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND CTO COMPANY: OPENCOLO LOCATION: SAN JOSE, US

SALLY SIMKISS TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND CEO COMPANY: OPENCOLO

EXECUTIVE BIOS

LOCATION: SANTA CLARA, US

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Sally Simkiss is the CEO of OpenColo and EGIHosting. She graduated with a BA in American Studies from Trinity College in Connecticut. Sally spent five years in the art market, buying and selling antique paintings before taking 10 years off to focus on raising her two daughters. In 2003, she and her husband founded a small gaming and streaming server hosting company that has grown into the hosting and data center enterprise she oversees today. Passionate about superior customer service, Sally seeks to bring the ethos of a “mom and pop” business to the often impersonal world of IT.

February 2022

Scott Brookshire is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at OpenColo. He drives and develops the company’s technical strategy and provides technical direction and insight.

He is hands-on in providing the OpenColo leadership with the necessary tools and insights to further the company’s mission and goals.

Scott has a Bachelor's degree from Cogswell Polytechnical College and brings with him over 20 years of working inside and out of the datacenter space.

He emphasizes developing long lasting relationships with customers, vendors and partners and is continually striving for win-win opportunities.

JONATHAN BITRAN

JAMES CHEN

TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND COO

TITLE: VP SALES ENGINEERING

COMPANY: OPENCOLO & ENERGY GROUP

COMPANY: OPENCOLO & ENERGY GROUP

NETWORKS LLC

NETWORKS LLC

LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO, US

LOCATION: SANTA CLARA, US

Jonathan Bitran is Chief Operating Officer for Energy Group Networks LLC and OpenColo. Before launching the company in 2003, Jonathan spent 8 years as a Data Center Engineer for Pelephone Communications Ltd, one of Israel's largest mobile network operators. Jonathan co-founded Energy Group Networks LLC as Stream Hosting, Game servers, Bare Metal and Colocation services provider.

Jonathan brings over 20 years of experience in the data center and hosting industry. In the early 2000's, passionate about music and telecommunications, Jonathan was a pioneer in internet radio, building and operating one of the largest internet only radio stations at the time.

James Chen serves as VP of Sales Engineering at OpenColo. James also serves as General Manager of Energy Group Networks LLC, a leading provider of colocation services and bare-metal servers in Silicon Valley.

James has more than 20 years of Technology Consulting experience, holds a BA in Anthropology and Molecular Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and has multiple technical certifications.

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“ While there is more and more consolidation of data centre properties in the valley, we are one of the only, if not the only, independent data centres left in the area” SCOTT BROOKSHIRE

CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, OPENCOLO

the Valley, we are one of the only, if not the only, independent data centres left in the area. In a field that is dominated by “Big Tech,” we are highly responsive and personal.

When you tour our facility, you will do so with one of the owners,” Simkiss added.

“As a privately-owned company, we are not beholden to shareholders who demand ever-increasing revenue and profits. We are able to offer custom solutions and terms the big guys would never consider. Since I give many of the tours of the facility, I’ve become familiar with all of our customers. When they succeed and grow, we are also able to grow and succeed,” she said.

Power delivery and the N+1 cooling system As essential as industry-leading customer service is to OpenColo's value proposition, so too is running its facilities to worldclass standards of power management and cooling. Here too, explains Brookshire, the company is taking a boutique approach.

“When we first looked at the power plant design of OpenColo, it was clear to us that we had to design things with maintainability in mind. Since OpenColo is our flagship location, we decided to design the power plant with 2N redundancy.

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upgrades without long waits and costly set-up charges,” he explains.

As for the cooling plan, OpenColo implemented N+1 cooling for its first buildout phase, Pod 1. “Like the power design, this solution allows us to rotate off units to perform critical maintenance without risk of thermal runaway. We also needed a system that would continue to deliver lower PUE value as we scale up,” Brookshire said.

“We understand the importance of being able to offer 100% power uptime SLA and what that means for our reputation and for customers’ confidence entrusting us with their critical infrastructure,” he continues, adding that setting a very high safety standard for OpenColo’s staff, customers, and vendors has also been a top priority for the company. ”We designed a busway power system that allows us to provide power 130

February 2022

Outlook for the future and company partners SVP is one of OpenColo’s partners and provides the power for its data centre facility.

“In addition to providing the power for the facility, we work with them to select the blend of renewable power sources for our customers. These power sources can vary from wind, solar, and hydroelectric power and can help customers with meeting their renewable power initiatives,” said James Chen, commenting on how OpenColo collaborates with Silicon Valley Power.

“ We took a closer look at what we liked and disliked when we needed support or service. That helped us build the best possible customer experience team” JONATHAN BITRAN

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, OPENCOLO

Looking to the next twelve to eighteen months, OpenColo’s next major project will be building out its Pod 2 facility, which will be either for their own use or in partnership with a larger enterprise customer looking for a fully custom design.

“We are also implementing platforms for improved customer experience, including

a new website and streamlined ordering system with instantly deployed bare metal dedicated servers for EGIHosting. Next on the horizon are updated audio and video streaming offerings,” Simkiss explained.

She points out that OpenColo’s vision for the future, however, will see the company staying true to its values, commenting: “That said, we aren’t trying to offer every new service, disrupt anything or change the world. We are focused on what we know and do best - running a first-rate, reliable, and secure data centre and providing collocation and bare metal servers.” It looks as though the future of OpenColo, a small, yet very capable data centre provider from California, is going to be very, very bright indeed.

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TECHNOLOGY

DRIVEN BY MASS DIGITALISATION AND POPULATION GROWTH, THE AFRICAN CLOUD SECTOR IS POISED FOR RECORD EXPANSION, AND HYPERSCALERS ARE RACING TO MEET DEMAND WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

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rom Cairo to Cape Town, the hyperscale cloud industry across the African continent is gearing up for a boom of epic proportions.

Will King, EMEA Managing Director at data centre industry analytics firm DC Byte, demonstrates this trend in microcosm.

“Between 2013-2018, the Nairobi data centre market grew by just under 1.5 MW in aggregate (live, under construction and secured power) supply,” he explains. “In 2019, over 23 MW of power were added to that market.”

Throughout Africa - especially key markets south of the Sahara, like Nairobi in Kenya, Lagos in Nigeria, and Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa - there’s a rising tide of demand for digital services, driven by cloud adoption, widespread fintech investment, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There has been a fundamental shift in the connectivity landscape across the continent in the last 10 years, with significant investments continuing to be made in subsea, terrestrial and metro fibre, as well as into mobile networks,” explains Robert Mullins, CEO of the Raxio Group, a data centre operator that’s been building and managing colocation sites throughout central Africa for over a decade, and currently focuses on high growth but underserved markets like Uganda, Ethiopia, DRC and Mozambique, and has plans to further expand into the Ivory Coast over the next 12 months.

Mullins explains that, as connectivity infrastructure has passed a tipping point, the increased support for digital services has “allowed digital transformation to begin, while also driving down the cost of connectivity.”

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As a result, this has “increased the adoption of digital services by Africa’s residents, including cloud, and has allowed data to be transported more efficiently and effectively within, and out of, the continent.” However, Mullins notes that, while connectivity has leapt forward, the data centre industry has lagged behind. “The ability to store, transfer and process the data locally, is limited by the lack of proper data centre infrastructure. In this area, investment

has largely been lacking and this has become a limiting factor to the continued digital transformation,” he explains.

To put into perspective just how far Africa’s data centre sector has to come, the amount of capacity currently live in Paris or Amsterdam is roughly the same as there is on the entire African continent.

The pandemic, Mullins adds, “has further exacerbated the issue, by compressing nearly a decade’s worth of digital change into

ROBERT MULLINS CEO, THE RAXIO GROUP

just 18 months. As a result, companies, their customers and consumers have a greater appetite for digital products and services.”

As always, where there’s demand, hyperscale cloud providers are quick to follow. datacentremagazine.com

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“ AFRICA'S DIGITAL ECONOMY IS GROWING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT” ANTOINE BONIFACE

EMEA PRESIDENT, VANTAGE DATA CENTERS

Hyperscale at the bottom of the continent If you’re looking for a blueprint of the future of hyperscale development in Africa as a whole, South Africa is a snapshot of things to come.

“Africa's digital economy is growing at the speed of light,” says Antoine Boniface, EMEA President of Vantage Data Centers, which announced its first facility in Africa - a massive $1bn, 80 MW development in Johannesburg - late last year. “Soon, there will be 2 billion people living on the continent and the heart of the region's IT ecosystem is in South Africa due to the strength of the economy and its location.

You can serve North Africa from Europe for datacentremagazine.com

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TECHNOLOGY

“WE STILL HAVE A FEW MORE YEARS OF CALM BEFORE THE STORM IN [LAGOS AND NAIROBI] - EXCEPT SOUTH AFRICA WHERE THINGS ARE REALLY BOOMING”

the moment, but you enter South Africa can't serve the rest of in October of the region - it's too far 2021 because the in terms of latency. company “selects its That's why locations by following Johannesburg and its customers. Some Cape Town have of our key customers ANTOINE BONIFACE seen big digital that we serve in EMEA PRESIDENT, infrastructure Europe and North VANTAGE DATA CENTERS investment.”

America were looking Some hyperscalers have already opened to expand into South Africa, which is why up cloud regions in Africa over the past few we decided to enter the region with our first years, using providers like Teraco and Africa facility in Johannesburg.” The first 16 MW of Data Centres. Others have decided to selfthe 80 MW development is slated to come build their own campuses, like Microsoft’s online in July of this year, just a year and hyperscale campus in Cape Town which a half after initial internal approvals. “We opened in 2019. got the desire to do this project in January Vantage, Boniface explains, chose to of 2021, went to the board in March, got 138

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Growth Drivers

Tier III and above multi-tenant data centre facilities brought online since 2016

More than two-thirds of Africa’s data centre capacity is located within South Africa

Capacity needed across Africa

approval, started working on the site in July, and we're on track to go live one year later. It's basically an 18 month turnaround from the decision to enter South Africa to delivering the first megawatt in Johannesburg,” Boniface says.

According to estimates by the United Nations, Africa has the fastest-growing population of any continent in the world. At its current pace, nearly 2 out of every 10 humans will live on the African continent by 2030, and the region’s population is projected to double by 2050.

Africa’s population is also increasingly concentrated in urban centres. The UN also forecasts that more than half of the continent’s population will live in cities by 2040, and the number of African megacities (metros with more than 10 million inhabitants) is projected to nearly triple by 2040.

The combination of population growth and urban migration is guaranteed to drive digital transformation as never before seen speed and scale.

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“ THERE'S ENOUGH DEMAND FOR EVERYONE TO WIN” ANTOINE BONIFACE

EMEA PRESIDENT, VANTAGE DATA CENTERS

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Beyond South Africa The mega-demand cycle in the South African data centre sector is underway, but the next wave - according to Boniface - could still be a few years away. “We're seeing big investment in South Africa, which is why we decided to go there. The next markets to boom in the same way, we believe, should be Lagos and Nairobi. But the demand cycle is just starting to begin there - we're not seeing any big deal for 5 MW or 10 MW yet. We're not going to buy land in Lagos or Nairobi tomorrow, but maybe in 2022 or 2023.”

Outside of South Africa, Bonficace is “not sure the race has even started. We still have a few more years of calm before the storm in those markets - except South Africa where things are really booming.” In a couple of years’ time, however, “there will be a big race all over Africa, starting with the three main markets and maybe followed by places like Egypt and Morocco on the coast where major cables like the 2 Africa have landing stations.”

Africa as a continent is poised for a decade of unprecedented hyperscale growth, with the African Data Centre Association predicting that the region needs 1,000 MW spread across 700 data centres to bring capacity in line with demand today. By the time those sites are online, the need for digital infrastructure will have once again leapfrogged ahead.

It’s a unique situation where data centre operators find themselves racing, not against one another, but against demand. “There cannot be a scenario where one or two colo providers like us dominate Africa. We need 10 players like us building in Africa at the same time to meet the demand and build the ecosystem. We're happy to see our competitors expanding and some of our clients self-building, because we need to strengthen the ecosystem,” reflects Boniface. “There's enough demand for everyone to win.” datacentremagazine.com

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Sify Technologies: Simplifies digital adoption WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Sify Technologies has put Cloud@core at the heart of its products and services to simplify Digital adoption for Enterprises

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hey say a football match is a game of two halves and this is an analogy that can also be applied to the business world. Every successful team or company needs a visionary leader, and this is where Kamal Nath, CEO Sify Technologies, steps in as he has navigated the transformation of this Indian ICT services and solutions company for the past decade.

Named CEO of the Year by the World Leadership Congress, Nath has 30 years’ experience in this sector of industry and is a lifelong football fan who cites the late Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona as his inspiration. “Maradona was an extremely passionate footballer and a great leader who broke the boundary between football and life.

“I imbibe lots of management lessons from sport. I played football extensively and passionately follow the game. I derive lot of philosophies from the game which I practice and preach in my professional life,” said Nath who feels the ability of Sify to remain relevant to its customers has set it apart from its competition. “We have always felt that in some services we were ahead of our time.”

Headquartered in Chennai, India, Sify, a NASDAQ-listed company, is a comprehensive ICT solutions provider with global service capabilities. With Cloud@core at the heart of their product and services portfolio, Sify is focused on transforming the ICT requirements of the emerging digital

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OF PIONEERING INDIA’S DIGITAL ICT ECOSYSTEM

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Sify Technologies: Simplifies digital adoption

economy and the resulting demands from large, mid and small-sized businesses, cutting across all verticals.

Sify’s infrastructure comprising top of the line Data Centres and Cloud, the largest Enterprise MPLS network, DC and Cloud interconnects, and partnership with global technology majors, vast expertise in business transformation solutions modelled on the cloud, make it the first choice of enterprises.

More than 10,000 businesses across multiple verticals have taken advantage of their data centres, networks and security services and conduct their business seamlessly from more than 1,600 cities in India. Internationally, Sify has a presence across North America, the UK and Singapore.

DNA of transformation With its birth in 1995, Sify heralded the internet revolution in India. Through Sify, 146

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millions of Indians experienced internet for the first time. Sify cybercafe’s across the country brought Internet closer to homes at a time when the last mile communication was a big challenge in India.

In 2006, Sify took a bold decision to move away from an established consumer-facing business model to a 100% enterprise focussed company over the subsequent years. This has paid off very well for the company.

Sify’s journey in the last ten years is a testimony of the company’s DNA of transformation led growth. Nath says, “The biggest challenge for any company is to remain continuously relevant and strategic for clients in the midst of multiple disruptive shifts in the industry.”

Today, Sify has evolved as India’s leading Digital ICT Services company based on the strength of its key assets of Data Centres, Network and Cloud and related digital services.

KAMAL NATH TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER INDUSTRY: INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: INDIA Kamal Nath is Chief Executive Officer of Sify Technologies.

As CEO, he has successfully led Sify’s transformation from an Enterprise Network and Data Centre Service Provider to a Converged ICT Solutions and Services organisation. In the last 9 years, under his leadership, Sify has consistently grown in revenue and profitability and has emerged as a preferred Service Provide Partner for Enterprises, Public Sector & Government in India. Sify is currently uniquely positioned as both Service Provider as well as Systems Integration Partner for organisations driving their digital transformation journey.

Prior to joining Sify, Kamal Nath had a 17-year tenure at HCL Technologies, where in his last assignment as Country Sales & Business Head he led various transformational engagements with large Enterprises, incubated new business services, created innovative business models, and developed new and highgrowth vertical customer segments.

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“ Sify actually pioneered 3 key building blocks of the ICT industry in India - the Internet, Enterprise MPLS Network and Data Centre” KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

Nath joined Sify in 2012 and led it’s transition into the most comprehensive ICT solutions and services provider in India.

Sify has consistently grown in revenue and profitability and has emerged as a preferred service provider partner for enterprises, public sector and government in India.

“Sify was always a thought leader and pioneer. From spearheading internet adoption and penetration in the country to setting up the first commercial Data Centre, setting up the first Enterprise MPLS network in India, Sify always led the way.”

Nath pointed out: “You will not find any other company formed back in 1995 as an ISP, which has sustained, grown and remained relevant in the midst of so many disruptions in technologies and market. This speaks volumes about Sify’s resilience as a company and ability to change with time.”

Advantage of Hyperscale Cloud Provider partnership Nath pointed out that beside Sify’s own Data Centre infrastructure they have partnership with three leading hyperscale Cloud Service providers hosted at Sify’s 150

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Data Centre. “The advantage of this is we are able to create a hybrid cloud platform by virtue of the proximity of our data centre and the hyperscale cloud. The customers get a very good choice and option of hosting applications, either in a hosted model, or in one of the hyperscale clouds, or in multiples, which get interconnected through DC or Cloud interconnects.”

“While the customers drive digital objectives, or digital innovation initiatives, they can be rest assured of the underlying fundamental infrastructure. Our infrastructure platform provides flexibility, agility and choices to our customers.”

How agility helped during COVID-19 Nath pointed out that “when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we had to re-organize our priorities. I can now say that we walked a tight rope being concerned about our employees and families and at the same time preparing our employees to new ways of working.

We also had to support our customer’s mission critical business in sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, healthcare, utilities, and our employees were in the respective facilities or in the field, to keep customers critical infrastructures running. All this, while, remaining focused on their well-being” “We helped enterprises by managing their business and helping them to achieve business continuity in such a challenging situation. But the toughest part was the change management and working to ensure we sustained our own business.

We have had to look at how we do business with our customers and how we generate new contracts. It has been a huge learning curve but will go a long way to building our customer engagement models in the future.”

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“ You will not find any other company formed back in 1995 as an ISP, which has sustained, grown and remained relevant in the midst of so many disruptions in technologies and market. This speaks volumes about Sify’s resilience as a company and ability to change with time”

us to bring global technology into our data centres which enables us to build worldclass data centres, which are suitable for global customers and particularly the hyperscale Cloud Service providers which are expanding in India.”

“The other aspect I want to highlight is organisations like Schneider are building manufacturing facilities in India. With respect to the data centre technology, the big differentiator from Schneider and Caterpillar is the ability to provide equipment at a costeffective price. This is possible by virtue of the fact they are manufacturing in India.”

Innovation and investment Looking ahead to the next 12-18 months, it will all be about customer relationships and engagement, investments in infrastructure, and remaining closest to customers’ innovation journey.

KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

to change with situations, were relatively better prepared to face a situation like the pandemic. For the entire Sify team, the learning curve during COVID-19 was shorter and angular, than steep,” he said.

Power of partnerships Nath explains how Sify has leveraged the expertise of key partners • Schneider • Caterpillar • Siemens “Partners like Schneider, Caterpillar and Siemens play a significant role. They help datacentremagazine.com

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“ I find lots of management lessons in sport. I played football extensively and passionately follow the game.

I derive lot of philosophies from the game which I practice and preach in my professional life” KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

“Covid-19 has completely changed the priorities of customers. Every customer is taking digitalisation and digital transformation as the top priority. They are doing things which was never done. So, innovation is the key priority for Sify, over and above our existing Digital infrastructure and capabilities. We are also partnering with new age technology and platform companies and co-create newer models.

“We have a large annuity customer base.

So, every customer’s digital transformation journey is an opportunity for us.”

We continue to remain relevant to our customers and build on our legacy and the trust of our customers, while we innovate in this disruptive age,” said Nath - a leadership message which could equally apply to a football club or global organisation.”

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WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

SUSTAINABLE DATA CENTRE COMPANIES Data Centre Magazine breaks down the top 10 data centre companies leading the way in terms of energy efficiency, renewable electricity, and water usage

I

n the wake of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, the COP26, and an increasing awareness of the need for greater sustainable practice throughout the industry, Data Centre Magazine is bringing you the top 10 companies leading the sector in terms of environmental sustainability.

Data Centre sustainability leaders from the edge to the hyperscale - all place the utmost importance on using renewable energy, ultra-efficient designs, and minimal water usage in order to make their environmental footprint as light as possible in a time of surging global demand.

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10

Iron Mountain Based in the US (but rapidly expanding throughout the Indian data centre sector), Iron Mountain has taken ambitious strides towards more sustainable operations in recent years. Last year, the company joined a small list of early adopters committed to tracking the hourly renewable energy load of their data centres.

By tracking hourly usage from the company’s generator and comparing it to Iron Mountain’s hourly usage, the arrangement provides “a future view of how firms can transition to truly carbon free energy supply.”

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09

Scala Data Centers Scala Data Centers is bringing sustainable data centre design to Latin America. The DigitalBridge subsidiary is only a few years old, but has already expanded aggressively throughout Brazil, with plans to move into more countries over the coming years. Scala’s Brazilian operations achieved net zero carbon certification for 2020 and 2021, and its sites have been powered by 100% renewable energy under long-term PPAs, which are backed by renewable energy certificates, since 2020.

08

Nautilus Data Technologies Water consumption and land usage are two critical - yet often overlooked - components of data centre sustainability. Founded in 2016 by an ex-US Navy engineer, Nautilus Data Technologies looks to solve both of those problems by building data centres that float on the water. The company spun up its first site in April of last year - a 7 MW facility mounted on a barge in the Port of Stockton California, located just a few miles away from Silicon Valley, where hyperscale data centres guzzle down millions of gallons of fresh water per day in the drought-stricken state.

07

Edge Centres Necessity often proves to be the mother of invention. When looking for a way around lengthy lead times for land permits, edge micro data centre firm Edge Centres struck upon an innovative new approach: off-grid solar powered edge data centres. The sites, which continue to go live across Australia, have next-to-zero dependency on the local utility grid, and run year-round on solar power alone, making for some of the world’s most sustainable small-scale data centres in operation today. datacentremagazine.com

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TOP 10

05

Green Mountain

06

Ark Data Centres Ark Data Centres design, build, and operate some of the UK’s most efficient data centres. Its sites have been powered by 100% renewable energy for the past six years, and Ark’s innovative approach to water buffering has cut its consumption from local utility services by 85% which the company augments by capturing and filtering rainwater from the roofs of its facilities.

The nordics are often a byword for sustainable data centre design.

That reputation is at least in part thanks to the work done by Green Mountain since its founding in 2010. The Norwegian firm has a long-established track record of using 100% renewable power, thanks to Norway’s abundant reserves of hydroelectric and wind energy, which helps make Green Mountain’s environmental footprint among the lightest in the industry. The company even announced plans last year to use excess heat from its data centre in Stavanger to provide heated water to a nearby lobster farm.

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04

Schneider Electric Named the world’s most sustainable corporation by Corporate Knights out of more than 8,000 other companies assessed for 2021 Global 100, Schneider Electric has been a driving force behind sustainable data centre designs, equipment, and commissioning for over a decade. Schneider Electric is driving circular economy adoption, material-light designs, and carbon reduction strategy adoption throughout the data centre sector. They don’t operate their own data centres, but their influence is felt throughout the industry as a whole, pushing for a greener, more sustainable future.

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03

Verne Global Dedicated to leveraging Iceland’s low ambient temperatures and abundant geothermal and hydroelectric green power (Iceland is the only Nordic country to generate power from 100% renewable sources), Verne Global excels at delivering ultra high performance computing (HPC) in an environmentally friendly way.

“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,” explains Verne’s CEO, Tate Cantrell. “That is not just unusual; it is unheard of and actually impossible anywhere else.”

atNorth Based in Reykjavik, Iceland, where low ambient temperatures and ready access to abundant green energy makes operating sustainable data centres much easier, atNorth has steadily built a reputation as the Nordics' premier supplier of low-carbon, low-PUE, ultra-highperformance computing (HPC). The company's flagship Infrastructureas-a-Service product, HPCFLOW, is an AI and HPC-as-a-Service solution that allows HPC operators to consume HPC infrastructure in the most efficient manner possible.

While atNorth has mostly focused on operations in Iceland where it operates its two flagship sites, dubbed Thor and Mjolnir - the company recently announced plans for a new, hyperscale HPC campus in Northern Europe, which CEO Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson has said could be as large as 50 MW, and complement the points of presence atNorth is developing throughout major Nordic capital metros starting with Stokholm.

“ Stockholm is our first investment outside Iceland. We have plans to be a major data center player for the entire Nordic region”

02 Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO, atNorth

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“The site is supplied by 100% renewable electricity hydropower and wind power from northern Sweden. The buildings are wooden structures.”

EcoDataCenter Blending near-infinite scalability with the claim to be the world’s first (and only) “climate positive data centre” company, with three sites across the Nordics, EcoDataCenter is setting a new standard for sustainability in the industry.

In addition to industry-leading efficiency, heat recycling, and the use of 100% renewable power generated in the north of Sweden, Eco DataCenters’ climate positivity is also down to its use of wood (which traps carbon emissions) in the construction of its data centres.

Also, the excess heat transferred from its server rooms to a nearby heating plant represents a savings of about 700 – 800 hours per year in fossil fuel operations, which amounts to more than the company’s annual CO₂ emissions.

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AGGREKO POWERS SMOOTH ENERGY TRANSITION WRITTEN BY: DOMINIC ELLIS

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AGGREKO

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For more than 60 years Aggreko has helped businesses manage their power demands – and now the focus is on doing so sustainably as LNG and renewables rise in stature

F

ar from its Glasgow HQ and the COP26 conference halls, around 150kms north of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, Aggreko has been embarking on a new phase of industrial sustainability.

It has been integral to the development of a newly commissioned gas station at Ora Banda Mining’s Davyhurst Gold Mine, part of a broader global strategy to assist miners decarbonise their modular energy solutions.

Formerly running on diesel, the project – which provides around 8MW of power output – is believed to be the first to incorporate latest gas technology and involves a ‘virtual pipeline’ of gas being trucked over 650kms. It was installed in three months.

“We are very excited about this project,” said Rod Saffy, Global Head of Mining at Aggreko. “It’s going to save about 25,000 tonnes of CO2 and a great example of new technology coming to market, and miners having the foresight to commit to cleaner energy on site.”

Saffy says it now has similar projects up and running in four countries – two in Australia; two in Canada; one in Spain; and it is about to commission one in Chile. They are all between 6-10MW loads – five involve LNG truck gas and one is CNG compressed gas, and the distances are roughly the same, spanning between 500-1,000kms. datacentremagazine.com

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Powers smooth energy transition

Aggreko is on a mission to cut the amount of fossil diesel fuel used in customer solutions by at least 50% by 2030 and aiming to be net zero by 2050. The sustainable fortunes of its own business, and that of its clients, are very much entwined.

“LNG continues to be a strategically important option, and it’s certainly becoming more popular and providing a better option for our clients. Most mines that are running on diesel would prefer to run on gas,” said Saffy.

He foresees no reason why you can’t add a solar battery energy storage, and any other renewable, to this LNG arrangement.

“A good example would be our Granny Smith mine, where we have a gas-powered station and solar farm attached, and we’re looking at a wind option too,” he said, adding 172

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“ The Davyhurst project is going to save about 25,000 tonnes of CO2 and a great example of new technology coming to market, and miners having the foresight to commit to cleaner energy on site” ROD SAFFY

GLOBAL HEAD OF MINING, AGGREKO

AGGREKO

that it was one of the largest renewable microgrids in the world.

Power scale is a factor; if the loads get too high, nearing 30MW, then a lot of trucks are required as well as increased gas storage on site which means an increase in capital. “At this point it may make more sense to build pipeline infrastructure to the station, so it’s very situation dependent.”

Amid the transition from diesel to gas, renewables will continue to grow in stature, and batteries will reduce emissions further.

But access to gas can be a challenge.

“Not many mines have good access to pipelines, which traditionally has been a barrier to considering gas as a cost effective option.

However, we are seeing a trend where there are now more options available in the market to liquefying and transporting gas from the nearest pipeline,” said Whyte.

TITLE: GLOBAL HEAD OF MINING INDUSTRY: MINING LOCATION: GREATER SYDNEY AREA

EXECUTIVE BIO

Global knowledge at local level The advantage of global companies is when entering countries which may not be as developed, you can take established clean energy policies and commitments into these regions, added George Whyte, Managing Director, Australia Pacific and Global Mining Sector Leader at Aggreko.

“We are definitely the only true global company operating across all continents.

We apply global standards to mines, regardless of the country,” he said.

The company has seen rising demand in Africa, South and North America. It’s not only new mines which keeps Aggreko busy – mine expansions as well as scaling down a mine’s power needs is also important.

“There is an increasing trend, and definitely those running on diesel are looking to run on gas,” he said.

Aggreko is looking at alternate fuels, and as they become readily available, it will look

ROD SAFFY

Rod Saffy is the Global Head of Mining for Aggreko. Rod started with Aggreko in 2013 as an Area General Manager in the AusPac region, before quickly climbing the ranks to his current global position with the company. He is a business management professional with extensive experience in sales leadership, project management and engineering.

Having managed some extremely large teams of more than 250 employees, Rod has developed a high level of skill in people management, business and strategic management, sector deployment, complex matrix management and high performing teams.

With a Masters Degree in Engineering Business Management, and having worked for such companies as General Electric and Moog in previous roles, Rod has a strong background in the mining industry. His knowledge and experience are deeply ingrained, and he brings a deep understanding of the challenges and complexities of the mining sector to each project he engages in.

AGGREKO

GEORGE WHYTE TITLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR, AUSTRALIA PACIFIC AND GLOBAL MINING SECTOR LEADER INDUSTRY: ENERGY & MINING George Whyte became Aggreko AusPac’s Managing Director in 2013. He previously served as Sales & Marketing Director and Area General Manager, and has held various leadership roles within Aggreko since joining in 1999.

George brings extensive experience in the mining sector, having introduced the company’s Mine Cooling services and Life of Mine IPP contracts, and more recently solar hybrid solutions. Some of the company’s recent successes under George’s helm have included Gold Fields’ Granny Smith Gold Mine Power Station and Rio Tinto’s Amrun and Gove Power Stations. George’s recent focus has been to globalise Aggreko’s Mining Services with consistent standards of Quality, Technology and Expertise. He is very driven to support Aggreko’s customer base through its energy transition strategy.

George holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Deakin University.

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: GREATER MELBOURNE AREA

at technologies which will support these fuels.

He foresees thermal power will continue to play a key element in hybrid solutions.

“When you think about renewables, it’s going to be a combination of solar, wind and storage. To achieve a high penetration, you will need all three. Everyone has different targets. We would like to reduce emissions for our customers and have a pathway to that.”

Typically solar accounts for less than half of your thermal load, but Saffy believes that will rise as batteries become more efficient.

“Mines will be able to access more storage.” he said.

Aggreko is exploring how it can integrate green hydrogen into its fleet, and combine it with renewables and battery storage to build efficient and resilient hybrid systems, which will help customers achieve their sustainability goals.

“ It’s been a very busy year for us, and we’ve not seen the same issues in mining that we have in some of our other sectors” ROD SAFFY

GLOBAL HEAD OF MINING, AGGREKO

Targeted approach to partnerships Predominantly Aggreko operates independently, often executing the engineer, procure, construct and manage (EPCM) process themselves.

Although many peers offer renewable solutions, not many have the experience required when managing off-grid mine power.

“Occasionally we’ll partner with specialist providers,” said Saffy. “In Chile, we’re installing a power station at 4,500 metres above sea level and using specialist local contractors.

“We are also technologically ‘agnostic’, and prefer to design a bespoke solution which will include the best combination of renewable and thermal technology.”

While most sectors have been impacted by the pandemic, mining, with its remoteness and scale, has weathered it better than most.

“The mining sector is used to managing risks, and has a lot of controls in place,” added Whyte.

“It’s been a very busy year for us, and we’ve not seen the same issues that we have in some of our other sectors. We are datacentremagazine.com

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1962

Year Founded

400+ Number of Employees (AusPac)

£1.365bn Revenue British Sterling (2020)

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“ I wouldn’t say it is for all companies but EaaS is a hot topic and increasingly miners are saying ‘we do mining, you do energy’” ROD SAFFY

GLOBAL HEAD OF MINING, AGGREKO

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DID YOU KNOW...

MINERS ADOPT SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS Whyte said it is starting to see some companies adopt charging stations and believes hydrogen is definitely going to be a technology that presents itself in the near future.

“It feels that hydrogen is at the same place that wind and solar were 10 to 15 years ago - it’s a matter of time,” Saffy said.

“Whether it’s electric or hydrogen, it will mark a step change to ramping up green energy. Integration will be another game changing phase, not just the facilities but also the mobile equipment.”

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OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS The greatest opportunities are the pace of change with the energy transition, and market expectations. “We’ve seen this sharp acceleration in customer collaboration, and need for ‘fast track’ options,” said Whyte.

The principal threat is the new technology, as it always carries investment risk, he adds.

“But the advantage of miners outsourcing it means they stick to their core business.

We are confident in our experience to manage the energy technology.”

AGGREKO

“ It feels that hydrogen is at the same place that wind and solar were 10 to 15 years ago - it’s a matter of time” ROD SAFFY

GLOBAL HEAD OF MINING, AGGREKO

very optimistic about the outlook in the next year or so, despite disruptions to the supply chain.

“We aim to replicate Australian mining standards globally for consistency, both in terms of energy technology and compliance.

A lot of developing countries are looking for the same standards, so that’s a unique offering being global. We’ve seen a great demand in the appetite among the global mining houses to engage with us.”

He said its key value propositions are its in-house technology and flexibility.

“Aggreko’s scale and access to equipment, as well as investment in technology, is a great platform to start with,” said Saffy. “We can meet customers’ early contact needs and as things change, we can bring in new technologies and deliver it under the same long-term contract.”

“We have committed to investing hundreds of millions of pounds a year to support our energy transition commitments towards becoming a Net Zero business by 2050.”

The mining sector needs more flexible solutions, and Aggreko focuses on mobile and modular and integrating them with technology. Aggreko is able to offer flexibility by leveraging its short-term contract business division, and its business model allows for low cost for upgrades / swap outs which reduces risk for miners.

Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) is also rising in importance. “I wouldn’t say it is for all companies but EaaS is a hot topic and increasingly miners are saying “we prefer to do mining and we leave energy to specialists such as Aggreko,” said Saffy.

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Aqua Comms & Ontix

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AQUA COMMS

WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

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Neutral carriers Aqua Comms and Ontix stand at two ends of the connectivity spectrum but bridge oceans and cities for a seamless service to the end-user

H

ow did your New Year’s Eve selfie travel from Times Square to Trafalgar Square?

Have you ever thought about the transatlantic journey this, or any landmark photograph, takes once you have snapped the perfect shot with your smartphone.

First stop will be the visible mobile infrastructure provided by Ontix, such as a small 4G or 5G within the casing of a lamp post, and the second, more intriguing part of this split-second journey, is via Aqua Comm’s 5,536km subsea cable system from Shirley in Long Island in the US under the waves of the Atlantic to Killala, County Mayo in Ireland, via its points of presence in London and New York.

Once the Aqua Comms cable – known as AEC-1 – hits the city, Ontix, a nextgeneration infrastructure-as-a-service provider, picks up this global relay baton of connectivity to deliver your selfie as it pings into the smartphones of your friends, family or colleagues.

“I love the interconnectivity of what Aqua Comms and Ontix are able to achieve together as neutral carriers,” said Nigel Bayliff, Chief Executive Officer of Irish-based Aqua Comms which has specialised in the building and operating of submarine cables since 2014 and was recently acquired by Digital 9 Infrastructure.

As Aqua Comms focuses on its global ambitions with plans to connect Europe with the Middle East and India the long-term focus

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2014

Year founded

5,536km

Distance of subsea cable system from Ireland to US

2

Live cables from Europe to the US

1

Cable due to be completed in 2022 from Boston to Slough

2024

Cable completion from Europe to India

400

Gigabits per second on one channel/ cable

25+

Year lifespan of fibre optic cables

“We are putting high-grade electronics – the equivalent of electronics that go into a space shot — at the bottom of the ocean which is a place less visited than men who have walked on the moon.

It is a fascinating challenge both technically, politically and financially” NIGEL BAYLIFF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AQUA COMMS

Aqua Comms & Ontix pass connectivity baton from land to sea

Example of an image caption datacentremagazine.com

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“We’re creating infrastructure in a carrier neutral way – we don't sell to the customers of our customers. We stay in the layer of the industry which is neutral for anybody” NIGEL BAYLIFF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AQUA COMMS

NIGEL BAYLIFF TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER COMPANY: AQUA COMMS INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: DUBLIN, IRELAND Nigel Bayliff, CEO of Aqua Comms, is a global telecom veteran of 30+ years' experience.

He has been a consultant to cable development, private equity and government clients, and ViceChairman of the United Nations Joint Task Force.

Bayliff was also CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, where he introduced technological advances. Previously, he was a member of the executive team of FLAG Telecom where he was responsible for the operation of the FLAG Global Network, which encompasses 65,000 km of submarine cable systems providing carrier-grade connectivity to 40 countries. In 2006, he was elected as a Fellow of the UK Institute of Engineering Technology.

for Ontix’s small cell infrastructure is the UK market extending out of London into the shires.

These connectivity solutions are relied upon by today's cloud, content and carrier players.

“Ontix is at the forefront of providing the last few metres of connectivity to the end user,” comments Patrick Bradd, CEO of Ontix.

“The demand for capacity is unrelenting and while Aqua Comms is about moving bandwidth across the Atlantic we are getting it to the end user.”

For anyone sending a selfie from Copenhagen to New Jersey along Aqua Comms second cable (AEC-2) it’s fascinating to hear from Bayliff that it passes the iconic hull of the RMS Titanic which lies on the seabed off the coast of Newfoundland. “You can see some of the debris fields of the Titanic on our survey charts as our cable goes through a place known as the Seamounts Monument Area off the North East coast of the US,” says Bayliff who speaks passionately about an industry he has been part of since 1988.

Spine of the digital infrastructure Submarine cables make up the invisible information highways driving the global internet and form the spine of the digital infrastructure that power a digital world.

Dublin & London to New York was Aqua Comm’s first fibre-optic network route to deliver secure, low latency, high-quality transatlantic connectivity with diverse datacentremagazine.com

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backhaul fibre to additional Points of Presence (PoPs). The second was Copenhagen to New Jersey and the third cable from Boston to a data centre in Slough is due this year (2022). This continues to build on its vision of efficient submarine infrastructure ownership with membership of the HAVFRUE consortium and development of CeltixConnect-2 and North Sea Connect.

“We are putting high-grade electronics – the equivalent of electronics that go into a space vehicle – at the bottom of the ocean which is a place less visited than the moon & equally as inhospitable. It is a fascinating challenge both technically, politically and financially,” said Bayliff who pointed out it takes a year to survey the exact route and the cable is laid “with one metre accuracy along a 5,000km route” with the whole project taking up to five years.

Power of fibre optics It’s incredible to think the first ever cable connection under the ‘pond’ was in 1858 when Queen Victoria sent a telegram to US President James Buchanan honouring his "great international work". The message took over 17 hours to deliver, at two minutes and five seconds per letter by Morse code. Today an email will travel at 99% the speed of light.

“ I love the interconnectivity of what Aqua Comms and Ontix is able to achieve together as neutral carriers” NIGEL BAYLIFF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AQUA COMMS

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While the method of laying the cables in the depths of the ocean – by uncoiling them from the inside of a boat – has not changed, today’s fibre optic cables are built to survive.

The capacity of a modern fibre optic cable is in the order of hundreds of terabits – typically the equivalent of running more than 100m zoom video calls per second.

Bayliff, who was involved in laying one of the first private optical cables in 1988 highlights how connectivity speed has changed. “The entire capacity of the whole cable was 400 megabits per second. We've just launched a product which is 400 gigabits per second on one channel – that's one channel of 100’s on one fibre pair of eight – on just one of our cables. That’s a thousand times more capable than the

whole cable that cost US$1b to build when I started.”

As the world is expected to create more than three times the data over the next five years than it did in the previous five, this speed will be essential. Data will be generated in emerging technologies such as IoT devices which include sensors in homes, factories and cities, as well as driverless cars, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G. How two ends of the network spectrum came together Aqua Comms and Ontix may be at two ends of the network spectrum but they work together to pass the connectivity baton from land to sea creating. Both companies come

from the same development cloud which looks set to grow as the demand for mission critical infrastructure will be vital to cope with the exponential rise in data and online services.

“Aqua Comms and Ontix may seem like completely opposite business types but, in many ways, we are the same – we both deal in invisible infrastructure,” said Bayliff. “We not only share a common heritage but also carry neutral infrastructure for the deployment of all services. We may serve different parts of the marketplace with different technology but our approach is exactly the same.

“At Aqua Comms we intend to take our model for efficient infrastructure ownership, operations and distribution to the widest market in a carrier neutral way around the world. There's almost no ocean that it doesn't datacentremagazine.com

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INSIGHT...

QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS FOR NIGEL BAYLIFF CEO AQUA COMMS

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How many miles of cable do you currently have under the sea?

Aqua Comms currently has two cables in operation with another due in 2022 (AEC-3) from Boston to Slough. There are also two shorter routes from Dublin to Anglesea and Blackpool plus plans for a cable from Europe to India – via Egypt and down the Red Sea (EMIC-1)- which will be ready in 2024. This equates to 20,000km which includes AEC-3 and another 10,000km from EMIC-1 so 30,000 total operational or in development

by D9.

Where are the cables made?

Our two live ones were made by Subcom in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the US and we are having more made & laid by Alcatel Submarine Networks in Calais, France. They travel 70-80km at a time and then they have to be connected to amplifiers, which boost the signal. The cable is then wound backwards into a ship. In the case of our cables we laid them from either side and met in the middle which took about eight months.

How do you work to ensure the cable has the shortest passage through the shallow water?

We spend a year surveying an exact route –

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mapping up to 5,000km – and lay the cable along this route very accurately. We send out ships to survey the seabed and make sure there are no boulders, we avoid rock falls, shipwrecks, other cables, fishing grounds and navigate over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The Atlantic has about 300km of shallow water at each side which is less than 1,000 metres deep in which we have to bury the cable using a plough to avoid anything which disrupts the sea bed, like ship anchoring and bottom/trawl fishing.

Why is Aqua Comms not using legacy cable systems laid in 2000?

A lot of cables were laid around that time and are now getting old and almost incompatible with modern day product requirements. We’re all about selling a large pipe of bandwidth, and the current currency level is 100 gigabits, the next step up is 400 gigabit circuits and the older cables can't handle that technology as they have insufficient optical clarity in them.

In 2015 Aqua Comms laid one of the first two cables across the Atlantic in 16 years.

What is your focus when it comes to sustainability?

Most of the reduction in CO2 in the last 18 months should not be attributed to the pandemic but to telecoms which enabled us to shift to remote work, education and socialising and reduce our travel emissions” We should take that carbon deficit and chalk it up as a positive. Of course it’s not a zero-cost to install cables as it is essentially a product which does use fossil fuels in manufacturing and installation, but having cables on the seabed for 25 years will reduce the need for people to fly around the world to conduct business.

“ We intend to take our model for efficient infrastructure ownership and operations and distribution to the widest market in a carrier neutral way around the world.

There's almost no ocean that it doesn't make sense to do this in and it makes sense because that growth curve is quite well-established” NIGEL BAYLIFF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AQUA COMMS

make sense to do this within as the growth curve is well-established.”

In the UK Ontix is transforming the entire process for wireless network densification by investing in neutral shared small cell infrastructure – including connectivity – and selling this to multiple operators. This innovative business model enables operators

to benefit from small cells with 5G-ready connectivity at a much lower cost.

Patrick Bradd, who was appointed CEO of Ontix in August 2021, said: “We earn the rights to deploy our infrastructure primarily in urban areas in both indoor and outdoor settings, and we enable 4G and 5G services to be deployed at high capacity to meet user expectations. That’s what people are expecting from mobile networks.”

Outdoors, Ontix designs and builds small cell networks on lamp posts owned by local authorities to provide the capacity needed for 4G and 5G mobile, and deliver that to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) neutrally to ensure all operators can benefit simultaneously from their infrastructure assets. They don't own the customer consumer layer, but deliver connectivity to the subscribers of multiple MNO simultaneously. In a similar way indoors,

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Ontix provides operator neutral solutions by working with property owners and managers to deploy small cell infrastructure in offices, conference venues, and other indoor spaces where mobile capacity is needed.

“The demand for capacity is unrelenting.

Ontix is at the forefront of providing the last few metres of connectivity to the end user,” said Bradd who pointed out they are working with local authorities across the UK to deploy their infrastructure outside London and eventually into more rural areas.

“In places like the centre of London it's difficult to provide the right amount of capacity needed by mobile network operators, so we work with local authorities to secure the rights to use their street assets 190

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to put our equipment on and sell that as a service to mobile network operators.

“For someone standing in Trafalgar Square, their mobile phone is connected to a small cell that we’ve placed on a lamp post or the side of a building above street level. We are coming up with some very innovative solutions to hide equipment within lamppost casings.

Councils are keen to work with us as they know the importance of connectivity for their towns especially when it comes to attracting business and tourism.

“When we build small cell networks in towns, it is not only for the mobile network operators, but also to provide a neutral connectivity layer for smart city initiatives.

We’ve deployed live smart city solutions,

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“ I felt uniquely positioned to be able to drive that infrastructure layer as a service and provide network infrastructure providers and network operators high capacity in a much smaller space” PATRICK BRADD

PATRICK BRADD

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, ONTIX

COMPANY: ONTIX INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCATION: LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

EXECUTIVE BIO

including next generation WiFi connectivity and footfall analytics to power applications being developed by local authorities around the UK.” “Aqua Comms is about moving bandwidth across oceans and around the world but you have to get all that bandwidth to end users.

The old ways of building mobile networks just don’t provide enough capacity. Instead you need to build more cells, make them smaller in size, but higher in capacity. So, in a city, instead of using rooftops and having bigger cells, outside we put the cells on a lamppost and inside we put cells on office ceilings or walls. We can get a lot more data into a lot smaller space,” said Bradd Bayliff commented: “Patrick Bradd is experienced in the industry and understands what carriers want. Ontix is creating a layer that allows carriers to use their assets and I’m doing the same on the subsea fibre infrastructure side. We’re creating infrastructure in a carrier neutral way – we don't sell to the customers of our customers.

We stay in the layer of the industry which is neutral for anybody.”

TITLE: CEO

Patrick Bradd was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Ontix in 2021. Ontix, delivers next-generation wireless infrastructure-as-a-service.

Bradd is an experienced telecoms industry executive, with an international background in technology, operations, finance, and sales across a variety of service providers, managed service businesses, and telecom equipment vendors.

He has built and rapidly scaled technology businesses and most recently led the turnaround of QA Limited’s technology talent business as their Chief Operating Officer. Prior to that, Bradd has held senior C-Level technology and operational leadership and board roles at Essensys Ltd and Cable and Wireless Communications.

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DID YOU KNOW HOW D9 IS INVESTING IN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE “The greater the demand for the internet, the greater the demand for the infrastructure to support it,” claims D9 Infrastructure which has invested in Aqua Comms. The company targets sustainable income and capital growth by investing in the following: • Subsea fibre-optic networks • Data centres • Terrestrial fibre-optic networks • Wireless networks

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D9 raised more than US$400 million after a successful IPO – the trust started trading in March 2021 and has already raised more than US$1 billion. Originally Aqua Comms and Ontix had a common shareholder in the form of Aqua Ventures Ltd (AVL) until April 1, 2021.

The third part of D9 focuses on data centres. The company has just acquired Icelandic-based Verne Global which is 100% powered by renewable energy from geothermal power plants. “These three building blocks of radio distribution, fibre distribution and data centres form the backbone of D9,” said Nigel Bayliff, Chief Executive Officer at Aqua Comms. “We have already deployed US$600m in Aqua Comms and Verne Global.”

AQUA COMMS

THE ROCKET SCIENCE OF LAYING SUBSEA CABLES Laying a cable under the sea may not sound like rocket science, but according to Nigel Bayliff CEO Aqua Comms, it's not a million miles away.

For a start more people have walked on the Moon than explored the depths of the oceans on Earth and when you’re laying fibre-optic cables to last 25+ years the engineering has to be precise.

“We are putting high-grade electronics – the equivalent of electronics that go into a space mission – at the bottom of the ocean, which is a place less visited than men who have walked on the moon,” said Bayliff.

“Space and the sea have the same engineering challenge as it is not easy to repair. The cables have to survive in a harsh environment at the bottom of the sea. Our equipment is certified for 8,000m of water. That's an enormous pressure.

It's 83 megapascals of pressure. It's so pressurised it breaks water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen and the tiny hydrogen atoms push through the metal of the undersea equipment which creates a hydrogen contamination of things.

“The interesting thing is copper provides a good shield for hydrogen penetration. This is because it's got a dense lattice structure so the engineering is the same as it would be to keep somebody alive in a space capsule.”

As Aqua Comms continues its work on the new cable from Europe to India the construction company responsible have already surveyed the seabed of the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean

– a major project like this could take five years from inception to readiness.

“There is very little known about some of the seabed which is why we survey it with sonar techniques so we can view its shape and look for shipwrecks as well as other obstructions such as large boulders or faults in the sea bed.”

As Bayliff reflected on how Aqua Comms’ second cable from Copenhagen to New Jersey passes the wreck of RMS Titanic he is reminded how the film director James Cameron – famed for his movie about the ill-fated ship – is one of very few to descend the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific Ocean, to a depth of 10,898 metres.

“We have so much more to learn about the oceans,” said Bayliff who never loses his enthusiasm for using cables to connect the world.

“ Aqua Comms and Ontix may seem like completely opposite kinds of businesses but, in many ways, we are the same – we both deal in invisible infrastructure” NIGEL BAYLIFF

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, AQUA COMMS

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Visionary leaders Bayliff and Bradd are both seasoned veterans of the telco industry. Prior to joining Aqua Comms Bayliff was Vice-Chairman of the United Nations joint task force that examined disaster mitigation from the global web of undersea cable systems and was a member of the executive team of FLAG Telecom.

“Compared to what the business was like when I was young to now is astounding.

We partner and work with the very biggest; Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and across the spectrum to anybody who has a requirement to carry traffic from one side of an ocean to the other.”

Bradd has held operational leadership and board roles for both telecom equipment vendors and service providers. At Cable & Wireless, in addition to being an early adopter of small cells, in the Caribbean he faced challenges of connecting cable systems from Jamaica to the British Virgin Islands, and to Florida. “To build out cable systems was an 194

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invaluable experience. I got to see first-hand how one layer of a network drove the capacity requirements of other network layers.”

“When I came back to the UK, I could then really see the value in providing these infrastructure layers, but in the changing paradigm of needing a lot of capacity and in a really small space. I felt uniquely positioned to be able to drive that infrastructure layer as a service and provide network infrastructure providers and network operators high but much denser capacity,” he said.

Machine-driven demand Bayliff highlighted why more capacity is needed today. “It’s not about more calls to the US or selfies and social media – the reason is machine driven. Data is not only stored in the UK but it is also stored in the US as mirror data to form a global footprint.

This can happen with Zoom calls and taking photographs – whether you decide to share it or not – and emails.

“The first thing that phone will do is try and get that photograph back to the home data centre where your Apple or Android service is hosted. So what's driving this uplift in capacity and networking requirements is the machine to machine interaction that is mirroring data and moving that data around.”

Cable versus satellites You may ask what are the advantages of cables over satellites? With more than 1,300 communication satellites orbiting the Earth today and Elon Musk’s high-profile SpaceX attempting to monopolise this market with Starlink, you may be surprised to read that 98% of all data in our daily communications is carried by cables under the sea. There are more than 400 operational submarine cables today – stretching over 1.3million km.

According to Aqua Comms the reason is simple: submarine cables transmit substantially more data than satellites at far lower cost.

“Using radio waves to a satellite will be 100ths to a 10th of the capacity of the sort of similar thing in the fibre optics. So what Musk is doing is creating a mesh and yes, the satellites all talk to each other, but the pure volume of data that you can shift is minuscule and only people who don’t live at the end of a cable – such as those in more remote parts of the world – may decide to use satellites to maintain connectivity.”

Reflecting on how advanced optical electronics has advanced during his career, Bayliff commented: “Innovation has come a long way. Optical fibre transmission is essentially flashing a light at one end of a big glass tube and seeing it at the other end. But the chemistry that's gone into making glass is so pure today it means you don't lose that light across our 5,536km fibre optic cable which spans the Atlantic. That is quite amazing!”

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OPEN PLATFORMS, HPC & INDUSTRY 4.0 WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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TAURUS GROUP

2005

Year Founded

Computer Hardware Industry

120

Number of Employees

180mn

Revenue (Euros)

TAURUS GROUP

Arun Garg (Taurus Group), Menno Kortekaas (Circle B), Alex Ninaber (ClusterVision), and Jitesh Kohli (Solulever) discuss their collaborative ecosystem

B

eing in the technology business for over two decades, Arun Garg heads Taurus Group as its current CEO. "We have multiple disciplines within our company with a physical presence in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and India.

Founded in 2005 in the Netherlands, the business has been expanding since 2016, as it makes successful investments and acquisitions in several companies: 2BY2, Taurus Germany, Circle B, Solulever, and ClusterVision. Today, we proudly stand as an ISO 9001 company and are in the process of being ISO 27001 certified."

Taurus Group is a specialised and focused company that operates in a niche market with a good reputation. It provides its customers access to its global distribution infrastructure and, together with its enterprise integration, offers softwaredefined data centre solutions.

"As the parent company, Taurus Group has six operational entities. Taurus Europe is the main entity that carries out the distribution aspects," mentions Garg.

"Acquiring ClusterVision, Circle B, and Solulever coincided with our vision to grow and expand our product offerings. We have a great circular economy within these entities.

In The Netherlands, we all operate from the same office and make good use of each other's expertise and knowledge. Taurus performs the role of 'component supply'; Circle B designs, builds, and manages rapidscale sustainable data centre OCP server datacentremagazine.com

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“ Taurus Group has six operational entities.

Taurus Europe is the primary entity that carries out the distribution aspects" ARUN GARG

FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR, TAURUS GROUP

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infrastructures. Solulever is developing a whole software-based AI analytics suite which happily runs on OCP hardware whilst ClusterVision is a turn-key solutions provider for HPC, AI and data at scale. ” Garg adds, "Being a business that very much revolves around storage components, the majority of our revenue comes from storage products, which we sell as a barebone product or as a complete solution." He explains, "we do not have any standard storage solutions for our customers as we offer tailor-made solutions based on the specific requirements of individual customers."

"Our business interests are split into two broad areas: the first being distribution, and the second being solution, development and R&D. Our core products and services include

TAURUS GROUP

ARUN GARG TITLE: FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR

COMPANY: TAURUS GROUP

Arun, Founder and Managing Director of Taurus, has over two decades of extensive experience working in the technology business. With a strong focus on a niche IT market, he strives to be a specialist in this domain. He believes in making successful business investments and acquisitions of companies dealing in specialised services to build a holistic business solution. His mantra of success lies in the few keywords: dedication, perfection, commitment, and meeting deadlines. His unabated dedication towards his goals from the beginning has led him to monumental success.

ALEX NINABER TITLE: CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR HPC, CLOUD & STORAGE COMPANY: CLUSTERVISION Alex, Co-founder and Director ClusterVision, has vast experience of over 20 years in developing high-performance computing solutions. Having completed his PhD at Birkbeck College (London) with his colleague, he was inspired by large scale calculations in molecular dynamics, which led him into developing innovative HPC solutions. Owing to a strong background in chemistry and physics, he believes in being practical and always attempts to find answers to complex problems.

MENNO KORTEKAAS TITLE: FOUNDER & CTO

COMPANY: CIRCLE B

Menno, Founder of Circle B, has a vast experience in OCP and aims to deliver the power of open compute to most organisations as a scalable solution. Having an extensive background in IT and networking and being acquainted with the concept of OCP in his consulting years, he looks further to apply OCP hardware for data centres as an innovative way of building servers. The founder believes in combing sustainability with innovation which he delivers in his solutions.

JITESH KOHLI TITLE: CO-FOUNDER & CEO

COMPANY: SOLULEVER

Jitesh, the CEO and co-founder of Solulever, has 18 years of experience working with IT services and consulting giants. He leads a rich team of Industry 4.0 thought leaders, technologists, data scientists and domain experts, with a passion for bringing unparalleled platforms and solutions to the manufacturing industry by building unique Edge Platforms and industryspecific solutions. Over the years, he has built trusted relationships with customers, colleagues, advisors, and partners across a multitude of industries and countries in Europe and beyond.

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Taurus Group: Open platforms, HPC & Industry 4.0

“ Typically, we provide software solutions to complex business environments, along with HPC installations and knowledge to make these environments successful” ALEX NINABER

CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR HPC, CLOUD & STORAGE SOLUTIONS, CLUSTERVISION

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the distribution of key components, building and managing HPC infrastructure, EMEA OCP specialists, and software application focused on Smart Industry 4.0 with a development office in India," says Garg.

“Taurus Group is also a specialist in software-defined networking. The solutions we bring to our customers involve using software layers that provide flexible, efficient network fabric management when used to define the functionality of the hardware.

Hardware agnostic partner solutions such as those from Pluribus Networks help network operators manage the entire network consistently and holistically," says Garg.

He also adds, "Taurus is a great company uncovering endless possibilities of growth.

We can now offer end-to-end solutions to our customers, from components procurement to seamlessly managing

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their infrastructure. The journey has just started, and there is a lot to achieve. We are confident of bringing greater offerings to the market, making us a stronger company and a stronger brand."

DISCOVER TAURUS GROUP'S ROBUST ECOSYSTEM OF PARTNERS Circle B With a background in IT and networking, Menno Kortekaas, Founder of Circle B, was introduced to the OCP hardware during his consulting years. Looking further into the application of OCP hardware for data centres, Kortekaas found that a particular company was using Facebook designed hardware for their own open stack solutions.

"But, I found that this was not readily available in Europe, apart from a few smaller

companies in the US. So, I founded Circle B to operate in this space," says Menno.

Kortekaas explains that Circle B sells solutions based on specific building blocks, providing its customers with hardware.

“We have the IT rack that goes into the data centre, that's our biggest building block, which we then integrate into the rack, the power infrastructure, converting AC into 12 Volt DC. Then we add servers, storage, networking, cables and external connectivity.

We work with the customer based on their application, workload, and software application to match the hardware design to meet their requirements. We help them design a certain system layout, rack layout, or multiple rack layouts. We have also recently released a new service called 'Eclipse' which allows customers to choose between a CapEx model and an OpEx model, including datacentremagazine.com

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housing and connectivity to the internet or their public/private cloud."

Being focused on the technical aspects — getting knowledge and making technical solutions work along with concentrating on promoting OCP hardware adoption, Circle B combines its expertise with the financial capabilities and logistics capabilities of Taurus Group to deliver its solutions. "Circle B makes use of Taurus Group's financial department, marketing department and logistics department, which includes its warehouses, contracts, shipping companies, insurers, website managers, and event 204

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" [OCP is] more energy-efficient, easy to maintain, and more scalable. But this type of all-inone solution wasn't available in Europe" MENNO KORTEKAAS

FOUNDER & CTO, CIRCLE B

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and more scalable. But this type of all-in-one solution wasn't available in Europe."

Sustainable operations form a core pillar for Circle B. It is committed to taking sustainability a few notches up, promoting more energy-efficient and easier to maintain solutions. "By offering these solutions that are efficient and easier to maintain, customers can easily replace parts so that they don't throw away a whole device when a small part ceases to work. With the modular design, it is much easier to make replacements of parts for the customers," says Kortekaas.

"We are also working on open-source firmware development," says Kortekaas, who compares this service to a mobile phone. "At some point, the manufacturer stops supporting the operating system, so the device no longer has new applications.

The open-source firmware initiative called OpenBMC offers customers much longer support in these scenarios, supporting the firmware and updates to extend the life of the product."

organisers. By combining these skills, Circle B can focus on providing its customers with valuable solutions," says Kortekaas.

Inspired to do something innovative, Kortekaas founded Circle B in 2015. When working for a large consumer goods company, he began to see the shift from physical load balancers handled by a single person to an application that a team can manage. Kortekaas adds, "I saw that shift happening and was introduced to OCP hardware, which led me to the thought that it was a more innovative way to build servers.

It's more energy-efficient, easy to maintain,

ClusterVision Founded almost 20 years ago by Alex Ninaber, Director of High-Performance Computing (HPC), ClusterVision specialises in high-performance computing and managing extensive scale data. "Typically, we provide software solutions to complex business environments, along with HPC installations and knowledge to make these environments successful," says Ninaber.

Ninaber adds, "one of the challenges in HPC is that generally, we are dealing with relatively large installations; between €300,000 and €20mn. So, one of the challenges is that one needs a good financial underpinning to provide reliable solutions to the market. Taurus Group provides the datacentremagazine.com

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financial infrastructure and distribution services to complete various solutions, ranging from small to huge scale. Solulever opens up different paths for us as it provides us access to specific types of customers we otherwise would not normally be dealing with. Circle B typically takes care of the colocation and data centre for us, which is something that we didn't use to do."

Studying his PhD at Birkbeck College (London), Ninaber found that he had a specific need to do large-scale calculations in molecular dynamics. "At that time, large HPC installations were usually located centrally in a country. To do large scale calculations, one had to request time on these machines.

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together with a network and software to create our own HPC installation. This led us to be approached by a business customer to install an HPC division for them within their business. It turned out to be extremely successful, and three years later, we started our own company in the Netherlands."

When it comes to harnessing HPC in manufacturing, Ninaber says: "typically in manufacturing, HPC is used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations of airflow and similar complex yet intricate calculations. For example, wind turbines that we spot everywhere are carefully planned as before they are built; calculations are performed to identify the optimal wind shape in that area. In addition to this, HPC is used heavily in the automotive

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industry. Any process that requires a lot of CPU or GPU calculations, HPC comes to its use. For instance, manufacturing, physics, chemistry, finance, anything AI and even psychology are using HPC solutions today.”

Solulever Jitesh Kohli, CEO of Solulever, co-founded the company in 2019. "We operate within the space of industry 4.0, in particular digital manufacturing. We build industrial platforms to simplify our customers' journeys as they digitally transform their manufacturing operations. Our core products are called Brabo Edge Platform and Brabo Factory Cloud. This proposition is called Brabo Edge Platform, a unique platform that makes multiple layers of technologies required

to digitise manufacturing operations redundantly. We focus on batch and process manufacturing companies in Europe and India and have started making inroads in North America," says Kohli.

He mentions, "founded in 2019, Solulever, since its inception, was invested into by Taurus Group. Being a part of the family not only provides us with investment into its product development and market expansion, but we also benefit from the collaboration with sister companies, ClusterVision and Circle B, to drive the digitalisation of manufacturing."

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operations with real-time insights. "Our foundational product Brabo Edge platform covers 'all nine yards' of digitalisation needs when it comes to manufacturing.

Brabo helps manufacturers optimise their manufacturing operations through realtime insights, automation, and transparency into finer operations. Brabo is an open architecture and microservices architecturebased platform. These architectural choices set the platform aside from generic industrial platforms and offer unparalleled flexibility and scalability at a fraction of the cost otherwise possible. Brabo offers comprehensive integration possibilities covering varying complexities found in a shop-floor situation." adds Kohli.

Dividing manufacturing into three pillars, Kohli explains that "you are either trying to improve the utilisation of assets, which have been invested into or trying to improve the quality of production or trying to reduce the variable cost of manufacturing. To achieve any of these, there has to be a consistent architecture that is data-led and a continuous innovation programme is driven by common principles. Our platform essentially operates as that common architecture for continuous innovation and continuous optimisation."

Taurus Group:

ClusterVision:

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