NVTC Presentation: The Data Center Transformation

Now, on to the links! A good starting point is our overview of the Northern Virginia data center market:

Red Hot in NoVa: Burst of Leasing, New Construction in Ashburn: Digital Realty plans to build up to 2 million square feet of new space in the heart of “Data Center Alley” in Ashburn, Virginia. Data center companies have bought up hundreds of acres of land for future development in northern Virginia, ensuring compute capacity for the clouds to come.

Connected Cars

• Uber Scales Up Its Data Centers to Support Growth: Ride-sharing startup Uber has leased large chunks of data center space in three major markets during 2015, expanding the future capacity of the real-time data platform driving its growing global transportation logistics empire.
• NVIDIA develops an onboard supercomputer for your car for self-driving applications. The Nvidia Drive PX2 is made up of 12 CPU cores and four GPUs, all liquid-cooled. That amounts to about 8 teraflops of processing power, and compares to ‘about 150 MacBook Pros’ for self-driving applications.
• Gartner: By 2020, a Quarter Billion Connected Vehicles Will Enable New In-Vehicle Services: The proliferation of vehicle connectivity will have implications across the major functional areas of telematics, automated driving, infotainment and mobility services.
• Self-driving cars could create 1GB of data a second: Analyst: “It is almost unimaginable how much data will be created when Google’s self-driving car will become common on the streets.”

Virtual Reality

• New Steps Toward the Future of Virtual Reality: Facebook: “As we continue to make big breakthroughs in the technology behind VR, we’re also investing in efforts to explore immersive new VR experiences that will help people connect and share.”
• Introducing the Telecom Infra Project: Facebook: “Scaling traditional telecom infrastructure to meet the global data challenge (of video and virtual reality) is not moving as fast as people need it to. Driving a faster pace of innovation in telecom infrastructure is necessary to meet these new technology challenges and to unlock new opportunities.” for everyone in the ecosystem.
• Why These Two Cable Companies Are Betting on Virtual Reality: Virtual reality may not reach large audiences yet, but that hasn’t stopped traditional media companies from investing in the emerging technology. NextVR has raised a $30.5 million Series A round joined by cable stalwarts Comcast and Time Warner.
• Next-generation video encoding techniques for 360 video and VR: “The file sizes are so large they can be an impediment to delivering 360 video or VR in a quality manner at scale. We’ve reached a couple of milestones in that effort.”

Data Center Business Models and M&A

• Super-Sizing the Cloud Campus: Internet titans are concentrating massive amounts of computing power in regional cloud campuses housing multiple data centers. We bring you inside a Facebook data center campus.
• More Data Center M&A Likely. But Who Will Be the Buyers? With an unusual number of data center assets up for sale, investors and analysts say the likely buyers will be strategic acquirers seeking expansion, rather than private equity firms.
• Investors: Asset Sales Reflect Telco Troubles, Not Colo Trends: Investors and analysts say the moves by telecom companies to sell data center assets are a reflection of trends in the telecom sector, rather than any worrisome slowdown in the colocation and cloud business.
• TierPoint Keeps Building With its Deal-Driven Growth Strategy: TierPoint, which focuses on second-tier data center markets, has grown rapidly through a series of 11 acquisitions in just six years. In its latest deal, Tierpoint acquired Omaha-based CoSentry.
• The Blurring Boundaries Between Wholesale and Colo: The boundaries between colocation and wholesale data center offerings are blurring. Our Executive Roundtable experts discuss why this is happening, and what it means for the multi-tenant data center industry.

Data Center Design

At Data Center Frontier, we’re jazzed about data center design. If you are as well, you’ll definitely want to check out our Design Channel. Here’s a look at some of the stories I reference in my presentation:

• Equinix Updates its Data Center Design: Equinix will be using a new design for data center projects that come online in 2017, incorporating hot aisle containment and indirect evaporative cooling. The company says the new design will reduce energy and water use.
• The Density Debate: Is Cooling Door Adoption a Sign of Coming Shift? Does an uptick in adoption of water-chilled cooling doors signal a trend towards higher rack densities in data centers? Colovore and LinkedIn are among those implementing rear-door cooling units.
• Data Centers Adapt as Tenants Seek Options on Power Redundancy: Several wholesale data center providers unveiled plans this week to offer data halls with less backup power infrastructure than traditional data centers, which typically offer multiple levels of emergency power in the event of a utility grid outage.
• Aligned Data Centers Seeks to Solve the Capacity Challenge: Aligned Data Centers hopes to bring cloud-style pricing and hyperscale-level efficiency into the multi-tenant data center sector. ITs approach is focused on the supply chain and solving the data center capacity management challenge.
• Compass Targets the Cloud Market With New Data Center Design: Compass Datacenters recently unveiled a new design, providing flexibility for customers to build larger and denser data centers. Compass believes the design will help it win business among cloud computing providers.

Edge Data Centers

• The Local Frontier: Data Centers Coming to a City Near You: There are more wired businesses than ever in towns and cities across America. That’s why the data center industry is coming to many cities you may not think of as technology hubs.
• Data Centers on the Edge: Streaming and IoT Reshape the Network: Streaming video and the Internet of Things are changing the data center landscape. As content companies move data closer to end users, more data center space will be needed at the edge of the network.
• Right-Sizing for the Edge: Data Center Design in Secondary Markets: Modular design and lean construction methods are playing a major role as the data center industry expands in new places. As data moves to the edge of the network, data centers are being right-sized to fit the demands of these new markets.
• EdgeConneX: Scaling Up the Lights Out Data Center: EdgeConneX is operating unmanned “lights out” data centers in 20 markets across the United States, marking the industry’s most ambitious use of automation to streamline data center operations,

Micro Data Centers

• DartPoints Plans National Network of Micro-Colo Sites: DartPoints plans to create a national network of micro-colocation facilities built in 100 kilowatt increments. These “private colo” facilities are housed within micro data centers designed and built by Schneider Electric.
• The RuggedPOD Project: RuggedPOD is a revolutionary modular computer chassis that doesn’t require any active cooling solutions. It is based on a sealed tank filled up with organic dielectric oil and electronics to create a new generation of computers.
• Quarnot Computing: The Q.rad is a smart and connected digital heater, fusion of an electrical heater and a high-performance computing server. Since 2014, several hundreds of households are heated for free with Q.rads, computing remotely for major banks, 3D animation studios and research labs.
• Nerdalize: By placing high performance servers in homes, Nerdalize creates highly distributed compute cloud without the overhead cost of conventional cloud and co-location solutions. Homes are heated for free and emissions are drastically reduced.