Building Resilient and Sustainable Edge Data Centers

Verghese Jacob CTO of DCI based in Australia takes us through what the edge means to them and how they are scaling out infrastructure in Asia to meet the growing demand. An industry veteran imparts his knowledge on both data center design, the Australian market and how DCI are approaching designing data centers at the Australian Edge.

In this session, Friso Haringsma, MD of DataCentre United discusses their expansion plans, investment in innovative technologies and how they overcame challenges to run high-quality, reliable proximity data center services in Belgium.

Kevin Brown, SVP, EcoStruxure Solutions, Secure Power Division of Schneider Electric discusses the challenges of managing the energy consumption in the hybrid IT environment of edge sites. The answer is first to focus on whether everything is being utilised effectively on the demand side. To do this operators need to understand what applications and devices are driving this demand and are those devices necessary? In edge environment this extends beyond infrastructure devices into IOT devices. The technology roadmap is there to answer these questions it just has not been implemented yet.

Data centers today are responsible for approximately 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions and are only projected to rise. This presentation looks at Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions associated with data centers, and discusses strategies for minimization. The presentation also goes beyond the traditional definition of data center resiliency and focuses on the challenges a changing climate places before us. A comprehensive collaboration between data center operators, customers and partners in the extended ecosystem needs to come together to help solve the defining crisis of our times.

Resilience is a hot topic in any data center but is a special problem for edge data centers.  Taking the traditional approach of designing redundancy and fault-tolerance in the mechanical and electrical systems could prove to be too expensive for edge operators.  Is there a solution which provides applications with resilience without over-engineering the supporting facility infrastructure?  Can this be done in “software” or the “network”?  This presentation looks at the challenges and opportunities for the edge ecosystem and suggests some approaches which may provide solutions in the future.

Serge Conesa the CEO and founder of Immersion 4 has an in-depth look at the drivers behind adopting immersion cooling. discussed the importance of using liquid cooling in edge deployments and what difference this can have to the sustainability of workloads. As always, an insightful look at the impact immersion cooling can have on the reduction of energy consumption and move towards lower carbon compute.

Africa has 17% of world population, but only 4% of world GDP and 1% of implemented data centre digital infrastructure.  Progress is being made with the undersea cables serving the Atlantic and Pacific coast lines of Africa, and enhanced with the recent announcements and implementation of Google’s Equiano Cable, and Meta’s 2Africa.  Progress is being made in progression of fibre optic penetration away from the seaboards into the ‘spine’ of Africa with more access to broadband penetration.  South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya dominate the implementation of data centres.  However there has to be complementary distributed data centre infrastructure across the continent, and in penetrating countries to enable delivery of content efficiently to the point of consumption and enabling 5G penetration.  OADC’s core to edge strategy aims to achieve that.  Implementing core, hyperscale data centres at key locations, and OADC EDGE data centres distributed to points to consumption.  The ‘midi’ data centres deliver right sized data centre infrastructures to countries where the right scale is required.  The presentation outlines the core – to -edge strategy, and in particular, the progress of implementing over 26 OADC EDGE data centres in South Africa.  The Midi and Core data centres have also been landing the Equiano and 2Africa cables at other locations in Africa.  The expansion plan is rapid and concurrent.

Zahl Limbuwala, Chief Operation Officer at AtlasEdge investigates the two categories of edge data centres in the guise of aggregation and proximity. Driving these two categories are two motions happening at the same time, but at slightly different speeds. First there is the cloud out motion where compute is moving out of the large core cloud data that have housed the growth of cloud globally for various reasons such as data sovereignty into carrier neutral, highly interconnected hubs in tier two or tier three metros in Europe. These are called aggregation hubs. The other motion is a pull from the other direction or edge in. In the most part this is driven by new applications that require compute on the edge, and we name these proximity. This allows either latency specific or bandwidth specific, or in some cases both, compute much closer to the source and destination of the data.