The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from three industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry. Here’s a look at the insights from Jakob Carnemark of Aligned Data Centers.
JAKOB CARNEMARK, Aligned Energy
As Founder and CEO of Aligned Energy, Jakob Carnemark oversees Aligned Energy, a sustainable technology company with a mission to innovate and optimize infrastructure within data centers to eliminate waste of materials, energy and water, and deliver the data center as a utility to large enterprises and cloud players.. He is responsible for directing the overall strategy for the company with a focus on lowering the cost and drain of resources needed to run data centers by more than 50 percent.
Prior to Aligned Energy, Jake worked for 11 years as the Senior Vice President of Skanska’s Mission Critical Center of Excellence where he was responsible for growing the international construction firm’s mission critical business. While at Skanska, he worked on large-scale complex projects, including building the first installation of Canadian-based TELUS’ smart, ultra-green modular data center that resulted in an 80 percent decrease in operational costs.
Here’s the full text of Jakob Carnemark’s insights from our Executive Roundtable:
Data Center Frontier: What will be the key trends that will shape the data center industry in 2017?
Jakob Carnemark: There are three trends that we are seeing that will continue to be a big focus for our industry in 2017 – cyber security, high-performance compute and IoT.
- Convergence of Security Layers: Cyber Security needs are moving beyond the traditional firewalls on the network and encryption at endpoints. The cyber wars of today require the convergence of physical infrastructure, networks and software layers enabling dynamic coordination. The increased reliance on mobile devices and increased adoption of IoT require companies to think more holistically about security and focus on end-to-end solutions. This requires next-generation data center infrastructure that can dynamically adapt to changing requirements.
- High-Performance Infrastructure: The debate on where rack densities are going is settled. The answer is all of the above. Infrastructure needs to be able to dynamically adapt to dynamic power and cooling requirements and efficiently move from low density storage to high performance compute rack densities as high as 40kW and beyond.
- Impact of Internet of Things: The IoT space is thriving. Many of the large enterprises we are speaking with have significant IoT initiatives underway. They are really looking for data center infrastructure and cloud infrastructure capable of building a robust and secure IoT platform.
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Data Center Frontier: There are signs that cloud technologies are gaining traction in the enterprise sector. How is this affecting the balance of the deployment of enterprise workloads between on-premises facilities, service provider data centers, and public cloud platforms? What will this look like in 2017?
Jakob Carnemark: The adoption of hybrid platforms will continue to increase as companies seek to balance cost efficiency and scale through the application lifecycle. The ability to drive seamless orchestration across platforms will be a critical need for businesses. Aligned Energy is focused on supporting next-generation capabilities such as application defined networks and advanced DCIM platforms so that our physical infrastructure from the network to the data center can be orchestrated by cloud and large enterprise clients.
An air containment system inside a data hall at the Aligned Data Center facility in Plano, Texas near Dallas. (Photo: Aligned)
Data Center Frontier: How is the pricing and availability of renewable energy impacting your data center business? Are customers being more specific about what types of green power solutions they are seeking?
Jakob Carnemark: More so than ever, the data center industry and large cloud players are focused on drastically curbing their data center water and energy use and moving to fully offset their carbon footprint with green power projects rather than just looking for carbon credits. Aligned Energy is continually looking to create and help foster the adoption of new technologies.
For example, we recently partnered with Swedish-based Climeon to bring a new green technology to the U.S. More than 50% of the world’s energy is exhausted to the environment as low-grade heat (below 190 degrees F), effectively making waste heat a largely available but unused resource. We now offer a new heat-to-power system that generates 100% green electricity from this low-grade waste heat (think steam from your cup of coffee). Innovation is always an evolutionary process, and we must continue to identify new solutions and technologies that will create new green power sources for the benefit of the planet and each other.
Data Center Frontier: What’s the state of modular data center solutions in 2017? What do you see ahead for these solutions?
Jakob Carnemark: Modular solutions continue to evolve. We seek to deliver the data center as a utility. We believe the right goal of modularity is to deliver the lowest cost of a kWh of compute power on a utilized basis on demand. Many current approaches to modularity actually dramatically increase stranded capacity and thus cost. The key here is the result, not the approach.