High, Mixed, & Variable Density Needs an Adaptive Data Center

Transcription

1 High, Mixed, & Variable Density Needs an Adaptive Data Center

2 Table of contents Introduction Business Response to the Age of the Customer is Digital Transformation IT Response is Cloud, HPC, AI, IoT, Big Data All Driving Density Data Center Response Has Been Slow to Change Data Center Response Needs to Be Adaptive High, Mixed & Variable Density Bottom Line

3 Introduction Customers are more involved than ever in how businesses deliver products and services. Customers expect convenience, personalization, speed, efficiency, seamlessness, ease, authenticity, and affirmation. They expect anytime, anywhere interactions which means digital and mobile. Customer expectations, in turn, drive businesses technology decisions. Organizations must be able to design, create, and iterate quickly. IT needs to be faster, more responsive, more scalable, and better able to collect, store, and analyze data (the digital universe is growing 40% each year). 1 All of this digital work is done, of course, on IT infrastructure servers for compute and storage, and networking equipment inside a data center. In this white paper, you ll learn how customer-driven demands on the digital world dramatically increase the variability of workloads and the density demanded of the data center. We ll explain how, in order to support those demands, data center infrastructure must change it must become more adaptive. And we ll show you what that adaptive data center looks like. It s one that supports the density high, mixed, and variable necessary to meet the dramatic increase in and variability of workloads. Key takeaways > > We are in the Age of the Customer. Businesses are responding with digital transformation, what IDC calls the biggest industry shakeout since the Industrial Revolution. > > IT has risen to the challenge, delivering tools that enable digital transformation tools like high performance computing to support AI, IoT, and Big Data applications, all of which drive demand for high, mixed, and variable density environments. > > The data center has been slow to change; there is a clear disconnect between innovation in IT infrastructure and innovation in the data center. > > Consequences of that disconnect include stranded power and space capacity and energy and water inefficiency. Those inefficiencies often end up impeding businesses attempts to nimbly respond to changing customer demands. > > Supporting higher densities and increasingly dynamic compute loads without stranding capacity, scalability without over-provisioning, and reliability even in an age of dramatically fluctuating data center power draws requires the data center to be for IT exactly what IT has had to become for the business: adaptive. > > An adaptive data center supports high, mixed, and variable density without stranding capacity or other inefficiencies. > > To support high, mixed, and variable densities, what Aligned Energy has done from the cooling perspective and the electrical perspective is architected traditionally static systems to be dynamic, able to handle different densities as well as variable power draws. 1 The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things, EMC. 3

4 Business response to the Age of the Customer is digital transformation The effects of our anytime, anywhere world are felt across industries. From connected homes, to precision oil and gas exploration, to integrated healthcare, to smart farming, and so much more, enterprises are stretching their boundaries in response to customer demands and in search of new opportunities. Businesses are unleashing technology s power to create not only new platforms and services, but also to develop the new business models and strategies required to scale and sustain them. Whether it s B2B or B2C, customers are driving the expectation that every business needs to be more responsive and creative in meeting their needs. This is what Forrester calls The Age of the Customer. Businesses have responded, in large part, with technology. Of course, IT has been used by businesses for decades, but this is different. Digital transformation what IDC calls the biggest industry shakeout since the Industrial Revolution is not an IT project. It s a business imperative. It is not just enough for IT, business, and DevOps to talk to each other. Digital transformation, across divisions, is the re-invention of products, processes, technologies, and cultures. To create successful customer-focused experiences, organizations must increase efficiency and agility and figure out how to attain digital operational excellence. Organizations that thrive during this transformation are those successfully integrating technology into everything they do. Technology does not just support the business anymore it is the business. Digital transformation - an unprecedented business transformation - will be the biggest industry shakeout since the Industrial Revolution. IDC 4

5 IT response is Cloud, HPC, AI, IoT, Big Data all driving density A business model in which customer experience drives the technology requires businesses to be able to design, create, test, and iterate quickly. IT has risen to the challenge. And IT infrastructure servers for compute and storage, and networking equipment has kept pace with the increasing amount and dynamic nature of the work it s asked to do. One of the key characteristics of digital transformation is data massive amounts of it. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. In fact, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. 2 High performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Big Data applications are at the same time products of and producers of the data explosion. Using tools like these, businesses have quickly moved from gathering and storing data to analyzing data sets to identify trends and identify the likelihood of future outcomes. For many companies, access to tools like HPC is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. For example, it s essential for the energy, oil and gas sectors for 3-D visualization, seismic modeling, and predictive data analytics. For biotech firms to process computational solutions for genomic sequencing, biomarker identification, and simulated drug test analysis. For high frequency trading, as well as stock market or fraud analysis in the finance industry. And technology companies use HPC to explore machine learning, virtualization, improved transaction processing and data warehousing. Compute loads high, variable, mixed The increase in knowledge through data comes at a cost data-intensive workloads. Cisco s 2015 Global Cloud Index predicted that the total data center storage capacity would grow nearly fivefold from 2015 to 2020, growing from 382 exabytes in 2015 to 1.8 zettabytes by [The] cloud will account for 88% of the total storage capacity. 3 And there will be significantly more growth as more device data goes online. Take IoT as one example. Each new smart or connected vehicle has an average of sensors and industry leaders project that to quickly reach as many as 200 sensors per car. These numbers translate to 22 billion new sensors each year in the automotive industry alone by In high performance computing, as another example, parallel processing is used to aggregate computer power and deliver much higher performance running advanced applications. To do this, HPC typically processes more than a teraflop (1012 floating-point operations) per second. To match what a one teraflop per second computer system can do in just one second, the human brain would have to perform one calculation every second for 31,689 years. 5 The increasing volume of data is one thing. Compute loads also are becoming more dynamic as demand varies from month-to-month, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and project-to-project. Ecommerce traffic spikes during the holidays, for example. Dynamic demand follows the sun traffic to a search engine s U.S. data centers is high during the day and lower in the middle of the night, though then traffic to its Asia data centers is high. And less predictable, but just as dynamic are compute loads that ramp up and back down as DevOps tests new ideas, products, or services. IT infrastructure and software have helped make this happen. Yet the vast majority of this data flows through and is processed and stored in data centers. Whether data is helping tractors drive straight in furrowed fields, tracking emergency room visits in low income neighborhoods, or recording how many times a retail customer picks up and puts down an item, it needs to be managed by both IT infrastructure and data center infrastructure. Which means that infrastructure must support exponentially increasing compute loads (high density) that are also increasingly dynamic (variable density) on a mix of old and new IT equipment (mixed density). Another factor behind mixed densities is the fact that as many applications drive higher densities, increasingly efficient storage modalities draw less power. IT infrastructure has evolved in both directions toward higher densities on the compute side, and lower densities on the storage side. For example, in the last five years alone the amount of compute load an individual server handles has increased exponentially. Advancements in chipset technologies are pushing compute densities up..5u server architectures, hyper-converged infrastructures, and the like are much higher densities. A decade ago, standard power densities in data centers were 3-5 kw per rack, but today it s not uncommon to see 8-12 kw per rack, with some deployments reaching 20 kw and beyond. IT infrastructure has evolved to accommodate variable workloads, as well. For example, servers can now use less power when utilization is lower and ramp up when necessary. 2 Bringing Big Data to the Enterprise, IBM Global Cloud Index, Cisco. 4 Automotive Sensors and Electronics Expo Understanding Measures of Supercomputer Performance and Storage System Capacity, Indiana University. 5

6 Data center response has been... slow to change As digital trends dramatically increase the variability of workloads and the density demanded of the data center, data centers the infrastructure that supports the digital world have been called upon to manage the load. It falls on data centers to manage not only increased workloads but also workloads that are mixed and variable. But advances in IT infrastructure have outpaced advances in data center infrastructure. Data centers have been slower than business or IT to embrace change. As much as technology has changed and the need for high, mixed, and variable density has grown, the data center hasn t changed much at all (with the exception of hyperscale data centers). Data centers as they re traditionally built and run are not agile, responsive, or scalable. The disconnect between innovation in IT infrastructure and innovation in the data center burdens the traditional data center in several ways: Traditional data centers are not designed to support very high density, or to support variable loads, without stranding capacity. And few can support IT footprints containing racks of varying densities, side by side mixed density environments created when putting older IT infrastructure in the same footprint as newer gear (i.e., servers with varying operating requirements for delta Ts and utilization. A data center s ability to support high density or ramp up and down in response to workload demand is driven by how dynamic its infrastructure is. Traditional approaches to power and cooling have evolved around relatively stable loads of similar density. That is not the compute of today. Cooling systems need to be efficient and stable under dramatically varying loads and delta Ts. The electrical grid today is dramatically more dynamic with the increased introduction of renewable energy. This coupled with more dynamic and growing data center loads will continue to put stress on the grid. To address these issues, the grid is moving toward frequency control as a primary driver for reliability. Frequency changes when grid supply and demand are unbalanced. Consequences of the ITdata center disconnect In the kind of environment we ve described, businesses need a data center that can: 1) support workloads that are dynamic from minute-to-minute; 2) support increasingly high density; and 3) support servers running at a range of densities side-by-side. To a degree, businesses have been able to accomplish those goals within the traditional data center, but only at the high cost of stranded capacity and energy and water inefficiency. Stranded power and space capacity (CapEx inefficiency) Traditional data centers are configured at a static density. The space layout and power and cooling systems are set up to support a certain density per square foot, and changing the density the footprint can support requires reconfiguring the layout, including power and cooling systems setup. In many cases, the traditional data center may have available floor space and racks, but no remaining power or cooling; or have the power and cooling capacity available, but no remaining space. So to allow for future growth in space, power, and cooling given the rapid rise in IT innovation and exponential increases in demand, traditional data center operators have to over-provision. That allows for future vertical and/or horizontal scalability, but it also means that the data center is underutilized, often for many years. And that leads to significant capital cost inefficiencies; an underutilized data center has a very high cost per unit of compute. Most data centers can support highdensity servers, but the only way to ensure that they don t overheat is to either half-fill the racks or spread them apart. Both approaches create stranded capacity, a significant inefficiency in the data center, and a key driver of low infrastructure utilization rates. Indeed, typical enterprise infrastructure utilization rates are 30-40%. Say for example a 333 sq. ft. footprint is set up with power and cooling to support 4.5 kw per rack a total of 50 kw across the footprint. Now the client wants to run higher density servers, at 9 kw per rack. The only way to accomplish that without reconfiguring the layout (essentially, starting over) is to half-fill every rack or spread the racks apart, to keep the total density to 50 kw across the 333 sq. ft. footprint. Increasing density by spreading across a greater footprint also creates the need for expensive consolidation efforts down the line. Users have to defrag their data center footprint a significant challenge in data centers that are configured at a static density. How big a difference can increasing infrastructure utilization make? A big difference bigger even than increasing energy efficiency. For example, if we increased energy efficiency such that PUE dropped from 1.5 to 1.15, that 6 Data Center Reliability and Efficiency in the Zettabyte Era, Aligned Data Centers, 8 Nov

7 would represent a 24% cost savings. If we increased infrastructure utilization from 30% (typical enterprise level) to 85% (typical hyperscale level) we could reduce costs by 65%. To be clear, energy efficiency is essential too the point here is that it s not the only metric that matters. Energy and water (OpEx) inefficiency Because the traditional data center can t support workloads that are dynamic from minute-to-minute, data center operators have to provision and run data center infrastructure as if IT loads were at their peak all the time. That allows the data center to support workload peaks, but it also means that the data center is grossly underutilized some, if not most, of the time. And that leads to energy and water inefficiencies (and the resulting cost implications) because traditional data center infrastructure is not built to run efficiently at low loads. 7

8 Data center response needs to be adaptive high, mixed & variable density To close the IT-data center disconnect, the data center must become more adaptive. Supporting higher densities and increasingly dynamic compute loads without stranding capacity, scalability without over-provisioning, and reliability even in an age of dramatically fluctuating data center power draws requires the data center to be for IT exactly what IT has had to become for the business: adaptive. How Aligned Energy supports high, mixed, & variable density This world eaten by software, where workloads follow the sun and business models are incredibly dynamic, needs data centers that are able to handle dynamic power draws and dynamic densities. So what we ve done from the cooling perspective and the electrical perspective is architected traditionally static systems to be dynamic, able to handle different densities as well as variable power draws (where traditional data center infrastructure is static and doesn t like highly variable workloads). Supporting high, variable, or mixed density is about the ability of the data center cooling system to deal with all the extra heat generated by high density servers without compromise. In order to create a data center that is capable of moving dynamically from 1 kw to 50 kw, Aligned Energy needed to rethink fundamentally how the data centers works. Our approach was born out of the understanding that the data center cooling problem is actually a heat removal problem. Aligned Energy s patented heat removal system responds to the shifting data tide, supporting high, mixed, and variable densities within the same row. Our cooling system can handle much higher delta Ts than is typical because instead of forcing cold air into the data hall, our system removes the heat at its source, with heat sinks close-coupled with the server racks. We solve the challenges associated with high, variable, and mixed density without specialized cooling infrastructure that is both costly and risky (water by your gear). Aligned Energy s cooling platform has a consistent energy overhead from 10%- 100% load and is able to respond to highly variable delta and air requirements. The system is dynamic in real time, ramping up and down based on server load. Variable speed fans and variable frequency drive (VFD) pumps allow flow rate to respond to changing loads. Our system matches the airflow of servers as they ramp, helping server fans spin down to their lowest levels. That lowers critical load, and at scale saves a significant amount of power and reduces airflow requirements. In addition, Aligned Energy has been developing and deploying foundational technologies to allow data centers to dynamically adjust for and protect against frequency imbalance. Our cooling infrastructure by design makes it easy to scale density vertically. Consider the example of the 333 sq. ft. footprint initially configured to support 4.5 kw per rack where the client wants to run higher density servers, at 9 kw per rack. Additional power can be installed at the rack level through the busway at the top of the rack. Likewise, additional close-coupled heat sinks, which have a nominal cooling capacity of 30 kw, can be installed at the rack level. If necessary, additional cooling distribution units (CDUs), which have a nominal cooling capacity of 350 kw, can be easily installed in a localized area in the data center to allow for vertical scalability. Now the same 333 sq. ft. footprint can support 9 kw per rack without reconfiguration of the rack layout. That kind of flexibility is especially important given that most colocation contracts and depreciation schedules for owned infrastructure are in the year range while hardware refresh cycles are in the 3-5 year range. 8

9 A New Approach To Heat Removal That s not saying density has to be uniform across a client s footprint. Many of the same technology innovations that make our cooling infrastructure dynamic also make it efficient and effective at any density. Because the heat sinks are closecoupled with the racks, clients can have a rack running at 50 kw right next to a rack running at 1 kw and both are equally efficient and effective, with no hot spots. How the data center is configured wholly depends on what a customer needs: pack 10 pods full of high density racks and the system can support them; have a pod full of storage servers at 3 kw per rack and the system runs just as efficiently. Have a pod with a mix of 50 kw compute racks side-by-side with 3 kw storage racks, or a pod of racks running at 50 kw sometimes and 3 kw other times and the system is just as reliable and efficient. In addition to frontend infrastructure which is pre-commissioned, preinstalled, and tested at scale, data center components are modularized and factorybuilt so that incremental capacity is very quick and easy to add. To be clear, the value of an adaptive data center is not in making the data center layer look more like the software layer. There are core economic drivers at work here: utilization rates of 30-40% represent a significant waste of capital and energy, and stymie a business s attempt to nimbly respond to changing customer demands. Beyond the infrastructure of the data center, the provider s approach matters too. At Aligned Energy, we re committed to being responsive to our customer s needs, so we truly are the partner for today and tomorrow. 9

10 Bottom line If you re shopping for a colocation data center, and a provider says they can support high, mixed, and variable density, follow up on the question and ask them how. Can Aligned Energy support high, mixed, and variable density? Yes, from 1 kw to 50 kw per rack. In significantly less space, with a variety of rack configurations and dynamic density that is easy to change without reconfiguring the rack layout all without any additional in-row cooling systems. Our modular power and cooling systems serve each footprint independently, and we can respond in real-time to variable IT loads. Beyond power density, other advantages of colocation with Aligned Energy include: > > Hassle-free growth. Use flexible configurations, whether high or low density, without re-configuring your footprint, to maximize footprint efficiency. > > Improved efficiency. Accommodate more server and storage equipment in your existing footprint in fewer cabinets and without paying for excess data center space to support growth. Data center efficiency improves, while stranded capacity decreases. Take the Aligned Energy Power Challenge We simulate up to 50kW per rack variable power densities live and prove why an Aligned Energy data center is the ideal home for your high density applications. Contact our sales team to set up your power simulation today alignedenergy.com/contact > > Reduced OpEx. Cloud-like consumption-based pricing, backed by a guaranteed 1.15 PUE. Convert traditional CapEx and utilize as an operating expenditure instead. Either way, we can accommodate your needs. About Aligned Energy Aligned Energy is an infrastructure technology company that offers colocation and build-to-scale data center solutions to cloud, enterprise, and service providers. Our intelligent infrastructure allows us to deliver data centers like a utility accessible and consumable as needed. By reducing the energy, water, and space needed to operate, our technology innovations offer businesses a competitive advantage by improving reliability and their bottom-line, while helping secure the health of the planet Aligned Energy. All rights reserved. For more information, please visit alignedenergy.com 10