The data center campus in Tallion, the capital of Estonia, will have a set of modern technologies whose objective will be to optimize the facilities’ energy consumption as much as possible, helping to improve sustainability and reduce costs. These technologies are Building Management Software (BMS), EPMS (Energy and Power Management System) software, and White Space Cooling Optimization (WSCO) systems, all from the German firm Siemens.

These technologies are expanding in the industry with similar bets from large equipment providers for data centers, such as Schneider Electric. With this example, the technology company wants to demonstrate the potential of artificial intelligence to make data centers more sustainable. As explained in their announcement, these solutions can automatically adjust the cooling systems of the server rooms to take advantage of every last watt consumed, improving the adaptability of the systems to any change without generating excessive consumption.

These tools are managed through a dashboard that makes it easy to monitor and control power distribution systems and employs machine learning software to optimize cooling. The creators of these systems claim that their solution has allowed them to achieve a PUE of 1.2 in the data center, while the industry average is currently 1.6.

In his announcement, Kert Evert, director of development of Greenergy Data Centers, explains that “this new complex meets the highest international security standards and aims to operate with 25% more energy efficiency than the market average”. For his part, Dave Hopping, executive director of solutions and services at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, commented that “as the demand for data center services continues to increase globally, digital tools will play a key role in mitigating the environmental impact of data.

With the two future expansions planned by its creators, these facilities could become the most significant data center campus in the Baltic countries. It is expected that they consume energy from 100% renewable sources. Adding this to the strategy of using innovative technologies to optimize consumption, this project will be an example to follow in other geographies where the industry wants to continue expanding, following sustainable development objectives.

Also Read: 7 Risks Of Artificial Intelligence That We Must Face To Manage It Effectively

The post Artificial Intelligence To Optimize Energy Consumption In Data Centers appeared first on Web Updates Daily.

The fight against climate change is leading many countries to abandon polluting energies, but renewable energies are not yet mature enough to satisfy the total demand. For this reason, nuclear energy is being reconsidered as a way to guarantee supply during the slow transition to renewables. This technology produces electricity with hardly any carbon emissions, and different industries are reassessing its use to avoid facing energy shortages in the years to come.

This change in perception is gaining momentum due to the war in Ukraine, which puts the supply of energy sources such as gas or oil at risk, making energy more expensive even though its generation does not depend on these raw materials. In response to this situation, the data center industry is considering combining nuclear power with renewable sources to ensure availability and stabilize prices in the future.

In a recent article published by the Uptime Institute, its executive director of research, Experts, comments that reluctance to use nuclear power due to radioactive waste will be overcome as it becomes more important to generate low-carbon energy. Carbon does not depend on the local climate, as is the case with many renewables. For this reason, he foresees that from 2022 some of the main data center operators and industry leaders will support nuclear energy, putting more pressure on governments to resume and encourage the use of this energy.

On the one hand, experts believe that the data center industry will publicly endorse nuclear power as a carbon-neutral source that is viable and necessary. This has already been seen through the EU Carbon Neutral Data Center Pact, whose members have expressed themselves in this regard. And the big cloud hyperscalers, such as AWS, Google and Microsoft, also see nuclear power as playing an important role in “clean” power generation.

On the other hand, the Uptime Institute believes that more data center operators will purchase nuclear power as part of power purchase agreements (PPAs), combining it with renewable sources. This will help them ensure availability while looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and contracts of this type are already being registered in the sector. With this, they would also achieve greater long-term price stability, which does not happen with PPA agreements based solely on renewables.

One of the problems that experts perceive is that during the last decades, the tendency of many countries has been towards the reduction of nuclear energy in favor of other sources. For this reason, if new investments in nuclear plants are not made, the availability of this type of energy will be less and less. Although countries such as China and India continue to invest in new nuclear plants, their use is in remission in other regions such as Europe, Japan, and the United States. And in some cases, they resort to non-renewable sources to guarantee supply.

Innovative nuclear projects are emerging in the current context, such as new generations of Smaller Modular Reactors (SMR), which could meet local needs. Examples of this are private and government-financed projects in the United Kingdom, France, the United States or South Korea, where certain sectors are trying to boost nuclear power using new technologies.

This new generation of nuclear reactors allows for a much more simplified plant design, is highly prefabricated and has passive safety systems for cooling based on convection, pressure and other forces, eliminating the need for emergency backup systems. This reduced form factor opens the door to small-scale nuclear reactors (from 10 to 100 megawatts) for specific uses, which would directly supply electricity to companies that consume a lot of energy, such as hyperscale data centers.

In addition, the construction of this type of plant takes between 3 and 5 years, while traditional nuclear power plant projects have terms of around ten years. And experts say financing small nuclear power plants for large data center operators, which could cost as little as a few hundred million dollars, could be done through PPAs. This alternative to current energy would not only be of interest to hyperscale giants. If proven capable, it could be a viable option for large data center campuses and regions where many facilities are concentrated in a relatively small area.

Another advantage of these plants is that they would have pre-charged fuel to operate for ten years without costly and complex refueling. However, some questions remain to be resolved about the use of SMR in the data center industry, such as power redundancy, cost, safety and security of facilities, or the difficulty in matching the useful life of these reactors with that of the data center.

There is also strong opposition to nuclear power in many regions due to radioactive waste, which hampers initiatives to implement new generation reactors, such as SMRs. But the reality is that most modern renewable energy and energy storage technologies are not yet mature enough to replace polluting energy fully, and it will take many years to do so. For this reason, many experts believe that completely abandoning these sources without resorting to nuclear power is practically a utopia, and industries such as data centers will try to promote the use of nuclear power shortly to cover an increasing energy demand.

Also Read: How To Prepare Your Business Network For Microsoft Teams Telephony

The post Data Center Operators Rethink Use Of Nuclear Power appeared first on Web Updates Daily.

Cloud data center operators face unprecedented demand for services, which will force them to increase their IT footprint significantly, build new facilities, and rent space to colocation providers in the coming years. This will increase the complexity of monitoring and managing infrastructure, performing maintenance and other jobs, and facing a severe talent shortage, especially in new technologies.

To address these challenges, they are looking for ways to streamline their operations, automating tasks so workers can dedicate their time to higher-value tasks. They are adopting different automation technologies to do this, and one of those that will break into the data center environment is robotics. According to Gartner experts, by 2026, more than half of cloud data centers will adopt robots equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning, which will allow them to increase their operational efficiency by 30%.

Increasing complexity also increases employees’ time-consuming, routine, and tedious tasks, such as capacity planning, sizing of container environments and virtual machines, or resource management to maximize efficiency. These are fields in which automation can alleviate much of the workload that “data centers are an ideal sector to pair robots and AI to offer a more secure, precise and efficient environment, which requires a lot of less human intervention.” Specifically, it outlines four areas where robots can bring benefits to cloud data centers:

Upgrades And Maintenance: Industrial robots can significantly alleviate the workload of dismantling and destroying old servers, performing these tasks automatically, faster than human operators. And in the case of the cloud, the saving of resources is much more significant because massive updates are carried out very frequently in these facilities, which entail an excellent workload for the workers.

Monitoring: Thanks to the robots equipped with sensors, it is possible to monitor the temperature of the server racks in a more granular way, without having to install hardware in each cabinet, which takes up additional space. In addition, robots dedicated to these tasks can be equipped with other technologies to collect valuable information such as sound and images, making it possible to automatically detect other irregularities that may go unnoticed by technicians, especially if they are overworked.

Security In The Data Center: Cyber and physical security in the facilities is key to protecting the data centers and the workers themselves. In this field, robots can add a layer of physical security through biometric identification technologies, temperature control of people, and even identification of license plates in the parking lot.

Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning In The Cloud: Mechanical robots provide exciting possibilities for monitoring and operations in data centers, but if you add artificial intelligence and machine learning to the equation, the opportunities multiply. Gartner experts highlight the significant role that the combination of these technologies can play in monitoring and managing IT processes. Thus, the site’s reliability engineers can interact with the platform that manages the facilities through technologies such as natural language recognition that, thanks to machine learning, learn by use to improve efficiency further. And it urges operators to explore the possibilities that robots, AI, and machine learning can offer in the data center environment. 

Also Read: Review Of Regulations Around Data Hosted In The Cloud

The post Cloud Data Centers Begin To Implement Intelligent Robots appeared first on Web Updates Daily.

One of The Australian startups has presented a project with which they intend to create a network of perimeter data centers powered by solar power generators installed in remote locations on the coast and inland regions of the country. This would make it possible to provide digital services in places where there is hardly any infrastructure under a more sustainable and self-sufficient concept until now. Taking advantage of Australia’s special climatic conditions, it would be possible to build a network of Edge data centers independent of the country’s general power supply.

This was explained by the founder and CEO of this startup, Jonathan Eaves, in a conference held during the latest edition of the Data Center World event. There he explained his proposal, which provides an exciting approach for the expansion of the data center industry that is going to take place in the coming years. He commented that it is possible to build a perimeter computing infrastructure based on solar energy since this type of infrastructure does not require such a power supply as large data centers.

To do this, he proposes to use an Edge data center design based on standard 40-foot shipping containers, which already exists, and only needs to be rethought based on the supply of solar energy. According to Eaves, this would allow, for example, to expand Internet connectivity in geography as vast and unpopulated as Australia, without the need to build extensive energy networks to provide energy. The same happens with connectivity, which could be carried from the coastal areas of Australia, where the largest populations are concentrated, to localities in the country’s interior.

His proposal has already obtained support. He is preparing the first network of data centers and fibre optics, which will cross the continent from North to South, passing through the interior regions of the states of Victoria and Queensland in the east of the country. This proposal wants to address the needs of companies across the country, and not just those of hyperscalers, which have so far been the drivers of the construction of Edge data centers and extensive facilities in the most populated areas of Australia.

At the moment, Edge Centers expects to complete 8 of the 11 sections of its “backbone” of data centers throughout this year, which will add a total of 1,600 kilometres of fibre optics and wants to build another seven sections in 2022, which 16 perimeter data centers will accompany. And the best thing about this concept is that the data centers will be self-sufficient at the energy level since they will have their solar panels for self-generation.

In his presentation, Eaves explained that approximately one acre of land is needed to install a generating capacity of 150 kilowatts. In addition, the systems will have their batteries, which in case of need can be charged through backup generators or the general electrical network. But, except in specific cases, the systems will be able to supply themselves with the solar energy generated locally.

The batteries, initially, will be lithium iron phosphate (LiFePo). Still, they are considering other possibilities to provide them with the necessary balance between performance, load capacity, durability, scalability and cost. Regarding the refrigeration systems, the idea is to use direct expansion cooling using outside air, which will keep the equipment necessary to provide IT power of up to 100 kilowatts per container in perfect condition.

The post Solar Data Centers To Expand IT Networks And Services appeared first on Web Updates Daily.

The data center industry is looking for ways to improve its energy efficiency to reduce its costs and the environmental impact of its operations. This is stimulating the contracting of renewable energy supplies. Still, operators are also studying the use of new technologies to improve energy management and reduce the general consumption of the facilities.

Traditionally, Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPS or SAI) are used, which minimize the impact of a cut in the electricity supply from outside. These integrate battery energy storage systems (BESS) activated by excessive fluctuations in the current flow. In many cases, redundant systems guarantee maximum reliability and service availability in data centers. In addition, many operators contract services from several energy providers to offer full guarantees to customers.

All this oversizing generates excessive and, in many cases, useless energy consumption, which produces a higher operating cost and increases the carbon footprint of data centers. These traditional approaches are proving inadequate to balance business goals with increasingly ambitious industry commitments to the environment, and new concepts are emerging that promise massive improvements in inefficiency.

The most revolutionary is constructing an intelligent energy network in the facilities, which integrates all the devices related to electricity supply and consumption, constantly monitoring and regulating energy flows to make the most of it. This implies that the UPS systems must interact with the energy network and the other associated systems, contributing to this energy management. All these devices generate information about the availability and level of power they need, which is used to understand the workloads’ requirements better and provide what is necessary in each case.

Through intelligent energy management systems that collect this data, the supply, the UPS systems, and the batteries they use can be optimized to the maximum. This requires a new generation of power and energy storage devices, and some of the industry’s leading manufacturers are working to equip their products with these capabilities. Experts believe this will bring them great benefits, thanks to the expanding sustainability stream in the data center sector.

A recently published article by research firm picks up current trends in data center power supplies, revealing that the market for UPS and battery technologies compatible with intelligent power management is growing. This accompanies developing the smart energy grid concept, which establishes a bidirectional information channel from energy providers to the end-user.

To integrate into such a wide interactive smart grid, data centers are investing in new UPS and intelligent batteries, monitoring systems, and energy management automation, a trend towards distributed energy resources that will spread in the coming years. especially in extensive facilities. UPSs with these interactive capabilities and compatible with intelligent networks are called standby UPS (UPSaaR), although experts commonly refer to them as smart grid-ready UPS.

Media highlights the role of Big manufacturers . They already offer this type of equipment and are highly involved in new technologies for intelligent management of data centers, such as DCIM systems that integrate monitoring-wise management of facilities. The market for these systems and brilliant grid-ready UPS and BESS is set to grow in the coming years as data centers pursue greater energy efficiency and integration with smart grids.

The post Smart Grids To Manage Energy In Data Centers appeared first on Web Updates Daily.