Sustainability is a society-wide issue. But datacenters, known to many as the biggest energy guzzlers, have a central role to play in delivering a sustainable future. Digital Realty can set the standard in this regard helped tremendously by its global reach, says Senior Solutions Architect Erwin Uit De Bos.
Digital Realty owns and operates more than 300 datacenters worldwide. Only its main competitor Equinix comes close with its fleet of around 260; no other operator even hits the triple digits. Each Digital Realty location must meet stringent requirements, ranging from security standards and compliancy to efficiency targets. When converted into a raw figure, the target set is a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3, an ambitious goal. On top of this, the aim is to provide the same high level of uptime and availability wherever you are on the planet. How has Digital Realty endeavored to meet these requirements?
Choices, choices
The cause for the global sustainability drive may be obvious. Resources that once seemed boundless are proving increasingly scarce. A singular nation may struggle with challenges that seem unique to it, but there are far more similarities than differences. For example, congestion of the power grid is a perennial issue worldwide. Power “is out of stock” all over the place, it seems. However, Uit De Bos illustrates how Digital Realty is making its mark in this new world of limited resources.
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As a datacenter giant, Digital Realty naturally has a huge variety of locations to manage. Some of them have turned out to be so antiquated that a retrofit was not cost-effective. For example, two datacenters were shut down in Amsterdam that were simply not going to be worth an upgrade. The land and location were returned to the City of Amsterdam, which has an opportunity of putting up some much-needed new housing there. Meanwhile, Digital Realty is preparing AMS11, a brand-new location on the Amsterdam Schiphol Campus. It will be operational by 2026. It is set to fully rely on renewables, as will all other Digital Realty locations in the Netherlands and Europe.
As mentioned, the global target for Digital Realty is a PUE of 1.3, explains Uit De Bos. This number represents the ratio between the total consumption of a datacenter location and how much power is actually spent on IT tools. So if you index IT-focused power as 100, the additional consumption in a Digital Realty location is less than a third of that output. That still leaves a laundry list of functionality to stick within this portion: one must include not only the cooling of the hardware, but also the lights, the (many, many) cameras, all sensors and all the employee amenities which exist at each location.
Power is still available, it’s just tough to get to
Datacenters are large energy consumers, but they only exist because there’s a demand for them. That sounds like an extremely obvious thing to say, but decision makers are still not always aware of the utility of datacenters, says Uit De Bos. Indeed, when they visit, he says, they are regularly quite negative on the whole thing, even as they’re busy taking pictures and sending them to ‘the cloud’.
That gap between the usefulness of datacenters and their outward-facing image can be drawn more broadly. Residents are about as eager to have a datacenter in their immediate vicinity as they would wish for a highway to be constructed next door, says Uit De Bos. But to harness the immense amount of excess heat from the roaring IT hardware, a placement near residential homes actually makes a lot of sense. The human misunderstanding aside, Digital Realty still does have other reasons for choosing the relatively remote area of Schiphol-Rijk rather than a residential area for a location like AMS11.
For AMS11, Digital Realty is building a substation from scratch. After all, power isn’t actually running out when it comes to what’s on tap from the main power lines, but the infrastructure to get the 110,000+ volts on these lines to a reasonable voltage is lacking. It isn’t a dedicated energy company that’s going to build the substation for AMS11; Digital Realty will do it by itself. It appears other constraints have forced the new location out of a potential residential area, with the lack of substations making the choice for them.
Nevertheless, like the other 300 Digital Realty locations, AMS11 was placed with purpose. Uit De Bos explains that the key decider is data gravity. The location scores highly owing to Amsterdam’s role as an interconnectivity hub as well as there being plenty of customers around. “That’s also why we’re not building a datacenter in [the rather remote] Eemshaven [like Google]”, Uit De Bos says.
One architecture (or: the Big Mac model)
Ideally, Digital Realty wants to “deliver the same Big Mac everywhere,” according to Uit De Bos. Every customer worldwide is meant to be provided with a certain high level of quality, a minimum amount of latency and a maximum amount of uptime. One big factor, however, is what customers end up wanting to do inside these locations in the first place. In his role as Senior Solutions Architect, Uit De Bos talks extensively with clients to discuss their aims. Those intending to run the heaviest AI workloads are guided towards a GPU-centred location, full of infrastructure set up for liquid cooling and massive deployments. What we mustn’t forget, though, is that the bulk of workloads are still relying on garden variety compute and storage. Either way, latency and compliance are key requirements, sometimes one or the other, sometimes both.
For Digital Realty, the key is to get the decision right with the customer the first time. “When we recommend a datacenter to a customer, we want to make sure they don’t have to move in another five years,” he says. This is a headache for all involved, and must be avoided. “I also often tell customers: I’m here to make sure you don’t have to move in the next 20 years.” To accomplish this, the goal is to discuss what organizations aim to do for the next few years, not just what their needs are in the here and now.
Sustainability is a moving target for Digital Realty as datacenter operators as well as for its customers. Germany is already implementing strict PUE requirements. The EU, meanwhile, now has some of the most stringent compliance requirements on data privacy globally. These factors already railroad customers into making certain decisions when it comes to locations. Uit De Bos says Digital Realty is motivated to help find the optimal solution.
“Many private datacenters aren’t filled up, and the problem is getting worse. They have to be at capacity to be efficient. Your facilities are measured to accommodate a full building.” It’s extremely inefficient to have your airconditioning cooling a room that’s only up to a quarter of its capacity. This problem is made even worse, says Uit De Bos, by the fact that new IT hardware is more efficient and powerful, requiring even less server space for the same workloads.
This process of erosion makes the aforementioned German requirements for ever lower PUE difficult to achieve. By 2026, nobody is allowed to use 50 percent more energy on top of their consumption of IT tools (PUE < 1.5). By 2030, this drops to 40 percent (PUE < 1.4). As mentioned earlier, Digital Realty already meets this PUE target with room to spare (1.3), but others aren’t as well-prepared. Such operators are now having to perform expensive sustainability-driven renovations.
You might think that liquid cooling and the use of rainwater offer opportunities for sustainability in this area. Unfortunately, the infrastructure required simply counts as overhead and thus increases the PUE. And in most countries, there’s no separate piping for rainwater: one is practically tied to drinking water for datacenter consumption. Only experimental scenarios allow operators to deviate from this.
Experiments
As a datacenter superpower, Digital Realty is able to set the standard for others to follow. But, Uit De Bos points out: it’s not possible for the company to experiment in its locations. That undermines the reliability of “the same Big Mac everywhere.” In effect, smaller players must be the ones to conduct bold experiments. Digital Realty does contribute by setting up pilot programs and acquiring innovators. In addition, the learnings naturally spread out across the industry. While the datacenter world is forced to move slowly due to its critical tasks and uptime requirements, Uit De Bos sees progress being made in the long term through major investments. Nevertheless, patience is a virtue as new developments are not immediately.
We’re not going to see the reinvention of the datacenter anytime soon. Still, Digital Realty’s construction of its own power substation does hint at a more active, broader attitude from operators. The conversion from 110,000+ volts (with a maximum of 380kV in the Netherlands) to 400 or 220 volts for IT equipment may have to be done near datacenters or they’re not going to be done at all.
The datacenter business isn’t as conservative as it may appear, and Digital Realty in particular is aiming to innovate where it can. It has to do so pragmatically, as seen by the steering of customers in their colocation choices. Uit De Bos’ company sometimes calls itself “the meeting place,” where data, compute and interconnectivity come together. But that meeting place is changing, and not just because of AI. “Smart” devices, from doorbells to lampposts, are demanding more and more connectivity, and consumers are as well. Uit De Bos cites research from The Uptime Institute that shows less than five percent of workloads are now AI-driven. In other words: change is happening in the datacenter world, and it’s being driven by AI, but not in the near term. More generally, the industry is having to deal with an increasingly connected world. This requires ever-increasing pragmatism.
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