The world’s power grids weren’t designed to help hyperscale knowledge facilities and pervasive cloud providers, not to mention synthetic intelligence (AI) workloads. With AI workloads turning into extra commonplace and scaling at unprecedented charges, power grids are extra strained than ever earlier than.
“The general public cloud created a wave of change in how knowledge facilities are constructed and operated,” mentioned Vladimir Ester, CTO and Cofounder of ClusterPower, throughout a February 2024 panel dialogue on IT sustainability. “And up to now couple of years, we’re seeing the subsequent revolution—which is being generated by AI deployments and, extra just lately, very large-scale Gen AI-related infrastructures.”
This AI revolution, he added, is contributing to the worldwide power disaster.
AI, which requires extra servers, storage, processing energy, and cooling than different sorts of workloads, has traditionally been thought of at odds with sustainability. However progress is now being made on a number of ranges.
“There’s a must grow to be extra sustainable and environment friendly at scales that weren’t doable earlier than,” in line with Ester.
Guidelines and laws are being established which can be driving knowledge facilities to be extra power environment friendly and advance sustainability, and the computing platforms that gasoline these knowledge facilities are taking part in an lively function in enabling these enhancements.
Driving effectivity and sustainability at stakeholder, facility, and platform ranges
Aiming to be climate-neutral by 2050, the European Union (EU) is confronting the power disaster instantly. EU requirements, necessities, and different initiatives—such because the EU Code of Conduct for Knowledge Centres, the EU Vitality Effectivity Directive (EED), and EN 50600—are geared toward bettering power effectivity, decreasing power consumption, and advancing sustainability.
Not solely are these laws compelling enterprises to rethink and revise their operations, however they’re additionally spurring innovation and new enterprise fashions.
ClusterPower, for instance, constructed the biggest knowledge heart facility in Romania with sustainability in thoughts. It’s the first in Southeastern Europe with twin Tier III certifications, and has its personal microgrid that produces power from gasoline and hydrogen. The ability even recovers warmth generated from its know-how programs, which is then used to chill those self same programs through an progressive course of. The information heart’s foundational computing infrastructure is constructed on Cisco UCS X-Collection Modular System servers which, in line with inside testing, can help:
- As much as 70% discount in complete footprint in comparison with earlier era servers
- As much as 49% discount in complete energy consumption with M7 programs in comparison with M4 programs
- As much as 90% discount in {hardware} working prices
- As much as 72% discount in {hardware} upkeep prices
- As much as 75% discount in recurring software program help prices*
Along with successful a number of awards associated to power effectivity and sustainability, the modularity of the UCS X-Collection helps the efficiency, flexibility, and scalability Ester mentioned is required for in the present day’s workloads—in addition to tomorrow’s bigger, extra power-intensive workloads. And the multitenancy and microsegmentation capabilities of ClusterPower’s Cisco Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI)-based community are driving operational consistency and effectivity whereas sustaining isolation and safety of a number of consumer environments.
“Effectivity is extraordinarily vital. We try to do extra with much less and we have to optimize the price of our operations,” Ester mentioned throughout the panel dialogue. “The AI revolution and its challenges are additionally extraordinarily vital. It’s one factor to deploy a basic cloud or computing platform; it’s a very totally different factor so as to add a bunch of GPUs that must be scaled shortly. My recommendation for individuals who are constructing new knowledge facilities could be to come back to leaders like Cisco, Intel, and ClusterPower, and have a look at fashions which have already been deployed and validated by the business earlier than leaping in and making investments.”
To study extra about ClusterPower’s knowledge heart and use of Cisco
UCS X-Collection and Cisco ACI, learn the full case research.
*Cisco Networking Compute Government Briefing Heart: X-Collection Sustainability, January 2024
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