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 Data Centers
As Founder and CEO of Aligned Energy, Jakob Carnemark oversees an integrated group of four innovative, forward-thinking companies – Energy Metrics, Inertech, Karbon Engineering and Aligned Data Centers – all of which are committed to solving the world’s toughest challenges associated with data center building infrastructure, energy consumption and water usage. 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 2016?
Jakob Carnemark: The data center industry will continue to be shaped by the underlying market force – the commoditization of compute. With public cloud costs as proxy for that commodity cost, many companies will have to become more adept at benchmarking and identifying the underlying inefficiencies in their organizations. The network and the data center continue to be barriers to efficient and agile IT, as server and software vendors have delivered on more efficient deployment models.
Network and data center solutions that can solve for greater reliability and agility while removing the significant overprovisioning waste in the current models will become go-to tools for companies seeking solve for the lowest cost of compute.
Data Center Frontier: Hyperscale single-company data centers have traditionally been the leaders in energy efficiency. How would you assess the progress of multi-tenant providers in improving PUEs and efficiency?
Jakob Carnemark: Large hyperscale data centers have a much greater cost advantage then just low PUEs. It’s the higher utilization of the infrastructure that really drives efficiency. The average company in colocation or owned assets spends 10x more on low infrastructure utilization than on higher PUEs. The barriers to efficiency are the unpredictably of IT loads and the static nature of infrastructure.
The colocation industry thus far has focused on delivering real estate without focusing on improving the underlying IT delivery model. This is a core issue that Aligned has focused on addressing in the industry. We are launching a data center platform that flexes to density changes in the same rack footprint. The data centers deliver a flat PUE curve of 1.15 guaranteed regardless of load and use 85 percent less water than traditional cooling approaches.
An illustration of Aligned Data Centers’ Phoenix facility, which is under construction. (Image: Aligned Data Centers).
Data Center Frontier: Analysts say the boundaries between colocation and wholesale data center offerings are blurring. Is this trend real, and if so, is it likely to continue? How are customers choosing between the different data center procurement models?
Jakob Carnemark: Customers are looking for flexibility and control. For too long they have been forced to take capacity according to an artificial, fixed-ramp schedule that resulted in them paying for more than they needed and used. This model is nearing the end of its useful life.
Customers have become accustomed to the cloud model of pay-for-use and are starting to demand a similar approach for their colocation requirements. In terms of retail and wholesale, we don’t believe in drawing boundaries. The customer’s needs are changing, IT hardware is evolving, and the cloud is offering them options they have never had before.
Our data centers are engineered to accommodate any scale requirement. We believe in a utility model for compute infrastructure. Customers want this flexibility and control over how they consume capacity, and many times it does not fit neatly into a retail or wholesale definition.[clickToTweet tweet=”Jakob Carnemark: Customers have become accustomed to the cloud model of pay-for-use.” quote=”Jakob Carnemark: Customers have become accustomed to the cloud model of pay-for-use.”]
Data Center Frontier: Airflow containment is an established strategy for optimizing data center cooling. How would you assess the adoption of containment? Does it differ between the hyperscale, enterprise and multi-tenant markets?
Jakob Carnemark: For many data center operators the cost to renovate an existing site to take advantage of new containment technology is prohibitive. When it comes to reducing energy consumption, each watt of waste translates into lower service margins. Hyper-scale operators and some progressive enterprise users are acutely aware of this and have spent the capital to ensure their data centers are optimized for delivering the greatest output with the least waste.
Multi-tenant operators tend to suffer the most as they have less control over the equipment and applications running inside their data centers. For them, containment can prove a challenge. We recognized this hurdle early on and engineered our data centers with a patented and proven heat removal technology that consumes up to 85 percent less water with a nominal power draw. As a result, we are able to guarantee our clients a 1.15 PUE. For some of our large clients, the cost savings will be substantial.