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Wednesday, August 30th, 2017
- You Can Now Spin Up VMware Servers in Amazon Data Centers
- VMware Wants to Be ‘Cloud Switzerland’
- VMware Pitches Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Edge Computing
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | How to Design a Data Center in a Norwegian Fjord Neither the Arctic Circle nor the middle of a town sound like the first choice for building an enormous data center, but that’s the kind of location a company called Kolos found in the Norwegian town of Ballangen, a former mining community. The team envisions its future campus there to eventually reach 1 Gigawatt in capacity; if that vision comes to fruition, Kolos will be the operator of the world’s largest data center. We spoke to Kolos co-CEOs Mark Robinson and Håvard Lillebo about the project, its design, and the modular approach the company is taking to fit a large data center into this unusual site. While unusual, it has most of the key characteristics of a suitable data center location, and the company is planning to use innovative design to work around its shortcomings. Powered by a nearby hydroelectric system, with more than a gigawatt of renewable energy already available in the wider local area, including wind power, the site is ideal for a data center that’s expected to use a lot of power. It’s well placed for expansion too; the Nordic countries are adding a significant amount of additional renewable capacity, planning to go from 5TW to 27TW by 2030, which should keep energy rates low. Because the energy is generated locally, there are fewer transmission losses, which means better efficiency. Robinson described the location as “dead center in a triangle of power sources, so it’ll be easy to get access to more power when we need it.” Not After Cloud GiantsLow energy rates should make the facility attractive to companies with compute-intensive loads. “Processing energy demands can be interesting,” says Lillebo. Connectivity isn’t an issue, either, as rail links to Sweden have provided a route over the mountains for significant amounts of fiber. Lillebo notes that Ballangen will have access to seven different dark-fiber routes with a 32ms-to-34ms connection to the main European peering points in Amsterdam. That should suit the types of customers Kolos is after. “This is mainly a colocation facility, so we’re not targeting the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples,” Lillebo says. “We aim to have the next 990 on the list.” It’s looking for customers beyond Europe too, companies that are looking for substantial compute power for batch jobs, where low cost is more important than low latency. Designed to Blend InUnlike most large-scale data centers, which tend to be in the middle of nowhere, Kolos’s facility will be a feature of the town. Built on reclaimed land, created with the tailings from a now closed mine in the mountains behind the town (the site was previously used for flood control and as a small airport), the data center will become part of a restoration of the town’s waterfront, blending into buildings and parkland that are being designed by the same architect, chosen because the town liked the plans for the data center so much, according to the company’s execs. That’s because it isn’t the typical big box full of server racks. Site renderings show a series of oddly irregular buildings, hugging the long, narrow stretch of land and covered with living roofs for added sound insulation. The first two data centers connect to an administration building that also houses the secure entry and a spine for meeting rooms, equipment, and network operation centers that will be extended as pairs of new data centers are built. Despite being in the middle of the town, site security is also good: there’s water on three sides, a berm down both sides of the lot, and a security perimeter than runs from the corners of the admin building to the edge of the water.
Stackable Modules, Potential for High DensityEach of the Kolos data centers will be shells that can be constructed in under 11 months; the first customers are due to move in in 2018, and Robinson predicts the first two buildings will be filled in 18 to 20 months, with construction of the next phase starting within six months. This phased buildout means the site can be up and running quickly, without massive capital investment upfront. The data center design is quite flexible. To fit more compute power into the narrow strip of land the equipment is installed in stackable modules built off-site; there’s a built-in set of rails and gantry cranes to move them into place, stacking them four units high, and connecting power, network, and water. The modules will initially be fitted out with standard 19-inch racks, though Kolos can customize pods for individual customers. As designed, each building will have capacity of 30MW, with racks specified for 6.6KW initially, though the DC power modules have extra capacity, and the cooling is rated to 21kW per rack if a client needs a custom high-density rack. Free Cooling to Assure Low PUEThe modules have been designed to handle the Norwegian climate, so they’re waterproof, but the climate is actually ideal for a data center. Temperatures in the steep-sided Norwegian fjords around Ballangen rarely rise above 10C, with an average annual temperature of just 3.5C and little variation from day to day, so chilled air is the main coolant for the data center. “We’ll be able to provide a very nice PUE, and you can’t do that in many places in the world,” Lillebo points out, joking that “if we get 14 days above 20C in the summer it’s an awesome summer”. For those two weeks, Kolos will use cold-water runoff used by the same hydroelectric plant that powers the site; it’s meltwater from up high in the mountains, so it’s already cold and needs very little treatment. Despite being at sea level, Ballangen is far enough down the fjord that there’s little fog, so humidity (a key cause of equipment failure) won’t be an issue. The town has lost nearly half its population since the mine closed, but it’s close to a NATO base and a large technical school, which could become a source for qualified staff. The location is also not far from an airfield and larger cities. The combination of cheap power, cool weather, and good connectivity makes countries like Norway and its neighbors ideal locations for data centers. (Ask Facebook, Google, and Apple.) The reason there aren’t more in this area is the lack of suitable sites; with mountains rising almost directly out of the water, there’s very little flat land. Taking full advantage of this reclaimed land in a fjord meant choosing a very different design for the facility, but it could inspire other data center builders to make the same step away from boring warehouses. |
| 5:43p | HPE and VMware Team Up on Composable Infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud Hewlett Packard Enterprise is joining forces with VMware to offer composable infrastructure based on HPE Synergy and VMware Cloud Foundation. The integration is called, simply enough, VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy, and HPE is touting it as the industry’s first composable platform using VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) platform. The companies made the announcement at VMworld in Las Vegas on Tuesday. This is all about the hybrid cloud of course, which providers have come to see as the brass ring for attracting enterprise clients. The solution promises to simplify transformations to a hybrid infrastructure by enabling single-click deployment of traditional and private cloud workloads and allows infrastructure to be dynamically reallocated in minutes. “In today’s competitive digital world, enterprises need technology that enables them to quickly introduce and scale new services,” Ric Lewis, senior VP and general manager of HPE’s Software-Defined and Cloud Group, said in a statement. “HPE Synergy with VMware Cloud Foundation will deliver a private cloud experience that empowers IT to be an internal service provider and enables rapid response to business needs with single-click DevOps delivery.” More VMworld coverage: Although the announcement is short on details about how the integration will work in practice, on the surface at least, this would seem to be a natural pairing. HPE Synergy is an all-in-one hardware solution introduced in 2015 that combines storage, compute, and network equipment in a single chassis and includes management software to automatically configure the hardware to provide only the resources needed to run an application. “HPE Synergy’s unique built-in software intelligence, auto discovery capabilities, and fluid resource pools enable customers to instantly boot up infrastructure ready to run physical, virtual, and containerized applications,” HPE explained at the time of the product’s unveiling. VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware’s SDDC platform for the hybrid cloud and is based on VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization. It delivers a natively integrated software stack that can be used on premises for private cloud deployments or run as a service from the public cloud. “HPE Synergy powered by Cloud Foundation will provide a powerful solution to consolidate traditional, private, and cloud native workloads onto a single integrated infrastructure platform that is simple to deploy and operate,” said John Gilmartin, VP and GM of VMware’s Integrated Systems Business Unit. “Customers will benefit from a highly dynamic, programmable infrastructure foundation that eliminates the operational overhead of traditional deployments thanks to new built-in lifecycle automation capabilities. We are excited about the value that HPE Synergy powered by Cloud Foundation will unlock to our mutual customers.” HPE said that VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy is expected to be made available later this year. Customers will be able to take advantage of HPE Flexible Capacity, which offers on-demand capacity and a pay-as-you-go consumption model. This wasn’t the only HPE/VMware collaboration brought to the table this week. HPE also announced Private Cloud Express with VMware vRealize, a new pre-integrated solution that includes VMware vRealize on HPE SimpliVity 380, a hyperconverged platform. “Private Cloud Express is ideal for remote and branch offices, offering best in class data services to simplify management and reduce costs, in addition to providing application assessment services to determine the best process for migrating applications,” the company said. |
| 6:00p | Dell Says EMC Merger Pays Off as Customers Seek `Fewer Partners’ |
| 7:10p | Report: After Amazon-Whole Foods Deal, Target Plans Move from AWS Cloud  Brought to you by IT Pro Will Amazon Web Services (AWS) start to bleed retail clients as merchants begin to pull out of their cloud investments with the company? With Amazon closing on its deal with Whole Foods this week, major retailers are taking a hard look at existing cloud investments and whether it makes sense to support Amazon as its lower prices could hurt them. Some retailers – especially those with a grocery business – are being more proactive than others with plans to bite back. Target is the latest major retailer to start shopping for an AWS alternative, according to a report by CNBC this week that cites sources familiar with the matter. Target will not comment specifically on the rumors, but told CNBC that it plans to continue to use multiple cloud providers. Sources say that Microsoft Azure is among the top cloud providers that want to grab Target from AWS. The deal would be a major win for Azure, as Target plans to aggressively move its e-commerce, mobile development and operations from AWS throughout the rest of the year and into 2018. Earlier this month Target merged its Target app and Cartwheel savings program into one app. Target said that there are more changes to come, including mobile payment for REDcard holders, which could signal more computing demand. In 2016, Target made two key hires to its technology team, including Tom Kadlec as senior vice president of infrastructure and operations, and Joel Crabb as vice president of architecture. Kadlec joined Target from U.K. grocer Tesco where he spent nearly 17 years. Target is not the only retailer who plans to assert its buying power with AWS. In June it was reported that Walmart told partners that their services should not run on AWS, and should consider Microsoft Azure instead. In a two-part pitch to retailers last month, Microsoft said that Azure provides flexibility, scale, and security along with a ready-to-use IoT Suite that can help retailers monitor in-store traffic patterns and shelf stock levels. According to a survey by IHL Group this year, brick-and-mortar retailers plan to spend 34 percent of their software budgets on the cloud in 2017, up from 26 percent in 2016. |
| 7:57p | HPE and VMware Team Up on Composable Infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud This is all about the hybrid cloud of course, which providers have come to see as the brass ring for attracting enterprise clients. |
| 9:38p | Dell Says EMC Merger Pays Off as Customers Seek `Fewer Partners’ Michael Dell: Corporate customers seek to buy more of their gear from a smaller number of vendors. |
| 9:47p | Report: After Amazon-Whole Foods Deal, Target Plans Move from AWS Cloud Will AWS start to bleed retail clients as merchants begin to pull out of their cloud investments with the company? |
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