DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show – Details, episodes & analysis

Data center operators are getting serious about waste heat and, more specifically, what to do with it.
While the solution for many is to pump it back into nearby district heating systems, other companies are getting more creative and using warmth from servers to heat aquafarms and greenhouses.

European operator Data4 has joined a project which aims to demonstrate that waste heat from its data center can help to grow algae, which could in turn be used as biofuel. Linda Lescuyer, Data4’s innovation manager, joins us to explain how the project is taking shape. 

Data center markets vary wildly by location, and in this episode we head "down under" to the wonderful land of Australia.

With the AI boom in full across the globe, Australia is no different and experiencing increased demand.  

We talk to David Hirst, who heads up Australia's Macquarie Data Centers, about the trends he is seeing in the country, how Macquarie is approaching AI, and the company's recent news, including its forthcoming IC3 Super West data center.

Oxide Computer has been rebuilding the rack. In this podcast, CTO Bryan Cantrill tells us why. 

The data center industry has been building its own infrastructure for years, with the wrong components.

Servers weren't designed to be operated in data centers, and the 1U rack unit is the wrong size, because of simple science. Part of the success of the cloud is that it takes that integration away, and gives users an easily consumed set of virtual servers and elastic infrastructure. But it costs, and it has pushed users to renting something they would be better off owning. That's why we heard of the "cloud diaspora" - organizations people bringing their IT back from the cloud.

But what people need, Cantrill says, is an elastic infrastructure for the on-premise facility. In this podcast, you can hear him explaining why his team found they had to rebuild almost everything to deliver it.

Think hard drives have hit their storage limits, and should be replaced by solid-state units? You could be wrong. 

Hard drives have been holding our data for nearly 70 years since IBM created the 350, which stored something like 4 Mbyte on dozens of spinning disks in a unit the size of a washing machine.

Today's devices are orders of magnitude better on every axis including price, capacity, size, and performance. But solid-state providers say it's time they moved over to make way for modern storage. Hard drives have been in a slump, but a new technique promises to double their capacity. 

Seagate is the first to bring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to the market, so we invited chief commercial officer B S Teh to tell us why it is such a big deal, why it's taken so long - and how it could change what you do in your data center. 

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we break down the fundamentals of quantum computing - the different approaches out there, the challenges to bringing it into a widespread commercial reality, and the potential use cases that quantum may help with.

To help divulge this, we speak to QuEra's Yuval Boger who shares a little about the company's experience with the technology, including how we can go about deploying quantum computers inside data centers.

25 years ago, the first content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged, to solve a specific problem - how to make web pages load faster.

More than two decades later, 72 percent of Internet content is delivered through CDNs. But the companies involved are still almost invisible - until something goes wrong.

In 2021, in a series of outages, large numbers of unrelated websites all went out of action at the same time. It turned out that these sites had all come to rely on the same CDNs, effectively installing a single point of failure for large sections of the Internet. 

Since then, large service providers have worked out how to avoid this problem - and one CDN provider told us in a podcast what to do when it does happen. 

Major CDN players have extended into a distributed cloud role, running applications at the edge, and Cloudflare, for one, believes CDNs have a huge opportunity in "inference" - when AI pre-trained systems are deployed for actual applications.

2021 also saw the formation of the CDN Alliance, an industry body that aims to be a voice and forum for CDN players, along with the ecosystem that has grown up around them. 

Mark de Jong, founder and chair of the CDN Alliance, tells us why CDNs need a voice, and what they need to be saying. 

Europe has an Energy Efficiency Directive, Germany has an Energy Efficiency Act, and operators there can be fined for inefficiency.

Meanwhile, Amsterdam has declared war on sleeping servers, and set limits on where facilities can be built. Across Europe, in response to congested electric grids and shortages of land, local governments are stepping in to regulate data centers.

Sometimes they want them to be greener, sometimes they want them to be quieter, and sometimes they just want them somewhere else. But any data center operator now has to be prepared to meet new reporting requirements and talk to the local authorities about their business. 

This is not a bad thing, says Venessa Moffat, head of channel partner manager EMEA Europe for EkkoSense. It's about time those discussions happened.

People who run cities need to understand the businesses that are located there - and from those discussions, new partnerships can emerge. 

At the start of 2023, Yuval Bachar told us about his latest project - to build off-grid, hydrogen-powered data centers. As 2023 came to an end, he was back to tell us he'd done it.

He's got 1MW of capacity fed by hydrogen in Mountain View California, and he's telling potential customers he can build the same thing anywhere you can get hydrogen shipped by pipe or tanker. 

He's keen on the benefits. No long waits for power distribution, no struggles getting permits for diesel. And the building is quick and cheap too. He can make them with a 3D concrete printer - which incidentally is environmentally better than tilt-up building, he says. 

He picked up the Environmental Impact prize at this year's DCD Awards, and joined the podcast to give us some more details on what he has done.... and what's coming next 

Ever wonder what it would be like to be a CEO at a telecom company in a country that is at war?
That’s been the reality on a couple of occasions for Ineke Botter, who has headed telecom companies in Kosovo and Lebanon. 
Her career has taken across Europe and beyond, spanning more than 30 years. She’s even worked in the data center industry too. 
Listen to find out more about Ineke’s incredible journey into telecoms.

The European data center market has a forecasted take-up of 440MW for 2023. But within the context of erratic power availability, moratoriums, and the need to move to renewable energy, the FLAP-D markets are facing several challenges.

In this episode we talk to Neal Kalita about the obstacles facing those looking to build in Europe, and what the future holds for the region.

Tune in for the conversation where we find the solution to keeping up with the pace of demand while prioritizing sustainability.