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New series of blogs coming

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 09:09:47 GMT

You could say and now for something completely different

Telenology has worked in the HPC server cooling space for more than 18 months now. We have had projects with data centers, telco operations, server vendors, banks and large enterprises.

We have worked in the areas of single phase and dual phase immersion cooling, Direct Liquid cooling also both single and dual phase, we have done TCO calculations, pitched business development options, written in-depth technical documents about weighing the difference options and led the deployment of various projects.

Shortly we will start on a new series of blogs to discuss various techniques, the pro and cons, the myths ... oh all the myths both positive and negative. We hope it will be an inspiring series of blogs.

Green Data Conference

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 08:39:16 GMT

See you at the Green Data Conference 2022

Also this year we will be at the Green Data Center Conference . Last year in the van Nelle factory, it was a great success. There were a lot of very good speakers and a critical audience. This led to good discussions because there is not one right or wrong.

This year will be even better but more attendees, a great line-up and at the Amsterdam Arena. We will be there at the stand of Submer with the reseller partner, Submerged Cooling Solutions .

A change in our thinking

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 12:17:55 GMT

The changing world of the local or edge data center

I had to think of the words of Albert Einstein when updating a list of data centers in the Benelux just last week. He wote: “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking”.

On a regular basis, I update a list of data centers in the Benelux. It is a list I have which I needed for a project a few years ago and I have updated ever since. It is a document of change in our industry.

The pleasant thing about the data center industry is that it remains very much in flux with mergers and acquisitions, new names of existing suppliers and the entry of new players. Also, you will find yourself chasing after a name from the past to find out that they no longer exist as a data center provider. The moment that I always find most striking is that moment when you find out that a major data center announcement never actually came to fruition.

So where do we stand? Well, at 107 suppliers with in total 259 data centers in the Benelux.

The question arises what does this mean? Let us take Belgium for example. There we have 19 suppliers with 34 separate data centers that offer third party colocation. The largest multi-site provider is LCL, with 4 sites and Datacenter has 3 sites. The rest all over one or two sites. Given that many companies come from a small beginning and given the high standards of data centers we perceive to be normal, this is often a great achievement. But on this list is also the Zayo data center, which I believe to be more of a proper telco room than a modern data center.

There are 17 data center providers with one or two sites in Belgium and often these are relatively small sites (not Interxion of course). These sites often cater for local business like one I found who advertises the fact that they house the server of the local football club (Unix Solutions with KV Mechelen). As more and more businesses move to SAAS and to the cloud for those servers they still have, new business (and stopping churn) will have to come from companies who choose to keep these own servers in their own physical domain.

The heavy users, businesses with a lot of compute and storage, will want to grow within a local data centers. For them it is a no-brainer cost wise not to move to providers like AWS, GCP or Azure.

We come to the questions: what is the future for a local data center? How will they be able to compete with the large players like Equinix and Digital Reality on the one hand and the hyperscaler cloud providers on the other? Will they need to specialise? Do they have a unique opportunity to cater for the heavy users instead of the local neighbourly business or will they become a local IT service company with a building?

…. Or in other words, do we need to change out thinking about the local data centers?

When Free Cooling is hardy free

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 18:10:25 GMT

An often misunderstood concept

The writer of Sherlock Homles, Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote in The Boscombe Valley Mystery: "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact". In the last years, we have been overloaded with new terms that that can be called deceiving. There is little less down to earth than "cloud computing" and in current implementations there is little free in "free cooling".

Free Cooling refers to the concept that you can cool an IT environment, most notably a data center, just using the outside air temperature. Therefore it sounds a lot like just opening up the window to let the heat out. Alas, it is a lot more complicated but let me bring is down to the most simple of terms: free cooling is when you do not need engage chiller capacity through the use of a compressor to cool the return coolant further and the outside air temperature is sufficiently low as to cool the coolant to the required level.

So all depends on the required return temperature. So to cool an office building and keep it at 20 / 22 degrees centigrade, the required return temperature is often set at 6 degrees. So if you pass air through a heat exchange the output air will be around 12 degrees and that is low enough to cool the building in summer to about 20 degrees.

Data centers tend to be warmer than office buildings but the outside temperature also needs to be significantly lower than the required return temperature to be able to reach free cooling levels. Generally speaking, the outside temperature needs to be at least 9 degrees before we can speak of free cooling, preferably lower. The temperature in the Netherlands is on average 10 degrees and rising. So you will have 3 months with days and nights of lower temperatures but in the vast majority of the time, the compressors of those sturdy chillers need to do there work.

And so free cooling is seldom free in conventional implementations.

... and how do you solve the issue, you might ask. Well, "elementary my dear Watson" - raise the required return temperature! How to address this, is the subject of another blog post.

Looking forward

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 12:07:53 GMT

Looking forward to 2021

Mark Twain once said: "it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future" and so I should not.

We live in turbulent times, now even more than normal. On social, economic and political fronts 2020 has been building up new levels of concern, concerns that for many has turned into real hardship, sorrow and despair. We, at Telenology, have been lucky to have been spared these hardships and all around us, people have been healthy other than a few with mild Covid symptoms. For Telenology, it has also been a good year and we have been able to work on some exciting projects.

Although warned by the great Mark Twain, so I venture into thinking about the future while realising our fortunate position. I believe that the problems of 2020 are a build-up to more economic fall-out in 2021 and that globally, we have a difficult time ahead of us. The global central banks have heeded us from a deep depression but their ammunition continues to have diminishing returns and the harsh reality of the pendulum of the economy will come crashing as a wrecking ball hits a dilapidated debt ridden economy.

In this bleak outlook, I believe that in the opportunity of an acceleration of change and an acceleration of a move to more a sustainable economic, social and environmentally friendly world. This will mean that in the coming year(s), many will loose out, some with proposer and I hope that we all will come out the better.

So on this Christmas day of 2020, we look forward to 2021, we look forward in the knowledge that we have some new and exciting opportunities ahead of us in 2021. We wish you happy holidays and prosperous and healthy new year.

Greece ? Yes Greece

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:06:08 GMT

Greek Data Center market is heating up

Greece is the place to be for several reasons and not in the least, for data centers.

While Greek data centers are not usually top of mind for many people in the industry, we have been pleasantly surprised by recent developments. As you know, Greece has become an important beach head the last few years for cable systems accessing Europe and not all wanting to exclusively go through Marseille. SEMEWE3, Asia Africa Europe 1 all connect to Mednautilis and Turk Telecom has been added more kilometres of network around Athens to Thesseloniki to connect to their network towards Bulgaria and Germany.

This has led to a rise of a number of data center players to service the local market and to support the traffic coming through the sea cables. Naturally Sparkle has invested heavily in data centers in Athens and Kopri but also companies are active like Lamda Hellix, Synapsecom, Lancom, Cloudrock and Interworks, to name a few.

Two recent developments have caught our attention. One is that Microsoft has announced to build a data center in Greece to further grow the Microsoft Azure and 365 services. This data center is an important boost to low latency cloud computing in the whole region, not only Greece.

The second is the acquisition of Lamda Hellix by Digital Realty, through their daughter Interxion. Lamda Hellix had aggressively increased capacity in their Athens 1 DC and with the new Athens 2 (Koropi) with about 11MW. This new DC was a big step up from the average DC size and power consumption in Greece and they have worked hard to gain an sizeable number of carriers with pops. A smart move was to get the SEECIX from DE-CIX ensuring a commercial, larger and internationally connected competitor to the GR-IX.

So keep a look-out for developments in Greece, as a stepping stone into the region and as a new route to Asia from Western Europe. Also I expect the cloud market to have significant further growth potential.

..... and when restrictions are lifted, the place to be for several reasons!

Data Centers eat the carrier's lunch

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 16:04:35 GMT

... and dinner.

In the past, we have asked ourselves if the data centers are becoming the new telecom carriers. We have stopped asking. It is very clear that the data center have eaten the telecom carrier's lunch and dinner.

I spoke recently to a highly placed director of large global data center player and he said to me, "Willem, it's crazy, several telecom carriers buy our intra data center connectivity while they can do it themselves. It is easier for them to buy from us, than to arrange it themselves internally".

Many data center players offer intra data center connectivity and a whole suite of connectivity services to the main cloud providers. So the main point of contact for a CIO for piecing a network together, are the DC guys!!!

But alas, it is not all sunshine and rainbows in the land of glory and data centers. When you have put together a business built around space, power and cooling, the network business is a different beast and requires an different skill from your people. That is where Telenology comes in: we can help data center providers in packaging network solutions including hybrid cloud for data center customers.

And so we ask the telecom carriers: what's for breakfast ? The answer I often hear is packaging data center services in with a bit of connectivity. Hmmmm, it is going to be a long day.

A viral world full of opportunities

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 10:25:12 GMT

Another boost for the data center industry

Now please do not accuse me of schadenfreude because this is not the case. I am however very optimistic about certain IT related industries with the rise of COVID-19.

As you know, schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a complex emotion, where rather than feeling sympathy towards someone's misfortune, schadenfreude evokes joyful feelings that take pleasure from watching someone fail.

We are now in de middle if the COVID-19 pandemic crisis with a rising number of infections and the subsequent deaths. The travel industry has been hard hit with travel bans and people just choosing not to go anymore. Offices are being shut down as more and more people are being asked to work from home. Schools and universities are shut down, festivals are cancelled. In supermarkets shoppers are explicitly being asked to pay by card are to avoid contact with the cashier. We are not allowed to shake hands anymore and so we tap each other’s elbow or do the Wuhan Shake, tapping each other’s feet. The last one is my favourite.

As COVID-19 and it’s future variants are not going to go away, we will see more social distancing. Everything that involves interacting remotely will become more relevant. As high speed Internet infrastructure is widely available and reliable in the western world, the prerequisites are already there.

So I am optimistic about all things that help working and living remotely, like conferencing equipment and services, services like Slack (who is having connectivity issues ….. why so now), streaming services for entertainment, supermarkets / shops without a cashier, even more online shopping. The list is long.

I am especially optimistic about data centres and see that data centres will benefit and will become even more relevant, the demand even more insatiable. I see a bright future for data centre companies.

… and if you want to read up on more schadenfreude, there is a book about modern schadenfreude called Schadenfreude: the Joy of Another’s Misfortune by Tiffany Watt Smith. Get it delivered, COVID-19 free, to your home through Amazon or Bol or my favourite local bookstore https://www.devriesvanstockum.nl/9781781259085-schadenfreude.html

Two years

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 08:03:49 GMT

Time flies

This website has been around for a number of years. The first few years, it was based on the theme "to jump". The idea was to jump into the new unknown world with Telenology. We all need to develop and making the first step as a person or as an organisation can be daunting. Telenology was and is there to help.

The website was all about bright and energetic pictures of people jumping, in the air, into water and just having a good time. Although the website was nice and cheerful, the content was not dynamic and it had no blog. Something needed to change !

So back in February 2018, we changed the site to this one. The look and feel is different, a lot more formal though that was not the idea from the start. The big change was - we had a blog, a blog platform, to regularly write about our thoughts, news and insights.

We are a little bit proud of the blog. We do not dare be proud but we are a bit. We wrote about latency while you would add the word "edge" now, distributed AI, the specialisation of data centres, SD-WAN, VMs in the world of containers and most recently about the bigger moves in the data centre market.

The blogs try to have a dash of humour, a bit of mythology from antiquity or thereafter and some appealing content concerning telecom, data centres, ICT, AI and developments in the market. We hope you have enjoyed the last two years of blogs and we look forward to writing a lot more the coming years.

Go Wholesale, young man !

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 11:03:09 GMT

Wholesale and new Wild West European Data Center frontier

The famous words "Go West, young man" are often attributed to Horace Greeley. Greeley was a writer and politician who is also well known for fighting against corruption of the then US President, Ulysses S. Grant. So in many ways, the world has not changed much.

What is changing is the focus of the data center industry towards wholesale projects. Many data center companies in Europe are following the mantra of "Go Wholesale, young man".

One of the major public announcements of recent months is the forming of a USD 1 billion joint venture between Equinix and GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. This joint venture should be closing any time soon. The joint venture aims to build what they call xScale data centers for the hyperscalers like Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google. As Equinix enjoys an significant market presence in the corporate market, building wholesale sites in metros alongside the traditional sites, does make sense.

CyrusOne is expanding as ever with in the Asian and European markets, expecting to open up a new site between Amsterdam and Haarlem early 2020, with sites expected in Frankfurt and Paris soon and currently boasting 20000 m2 in London alone.

And so many others are quietly making more plans so try and help the hyperscalers with custom-built, dedicated sites for the famous list of hyperscalers. As corporates look more to outsourcing to these hyperscalers and the reasoning is obvious. The questions remains, as to what role the retail data center company then will have and can the returns be made, the current shareholders and financiers are used to ?

An interesting counter movement is that of the proposed acquisition by Digital Reality of Interxion. Digital Reality, as traditional wholesaler, has spent a lot of effort to move into the retail market, now has bitten the bullet to accelerate into the retail market with Interxion. So when the guys who have been in the wholesale for quite some time are making advances else where, is wholesale the place to be ?

Just to come back to Horace. He campaigned to oust Grant as president but did not make it, even dying shortly after the election. Also we now know that his famous words were originally not his own but he certainly did make them famous. So there is fame in making bold statements, but is there fortune?

The horse ate my legacy VM’s

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 19:15:59 GMT

Cost and operational optimisation made a bit easier

When I hear of the name Anthos, I could not help think: which ancient Greek god was that? I did have to look it up and it was Anthos, the guy who got eaten by his father’s horses after he nearly starved them to death. In the end the whole grieving family are transformed into birds and all ends relatively well, sort of.

And with that in mind, I did want to come back to the announcement last April of Google Anthos. In short, Anthos is an open source platform that lets Kubernetes containers run on several clouds like GCP, Azure, AWS (to name a few) and of course on your own platform.

This is a game changer because now you do not have lock-in and an easy way of redeploying containers on various clouds which helps in some aspects of a multi-cloud strategy.

I hear you say-"yes but what about the VM’s?" (side note: to make things worse I heard somebody reference them today as “all those old legacy VM’s”). With Anthos Migrate, you just port your VM into a container and off you go. Now I hear you saying – “but is there surely not an easier way of migrating VM’s between clouds” and there you are right. But that is beside the point as you might be looking a moving to scalable micro-service anyway.

Anthos provides a single platform to securely manage your Kubernetes run over several in-house and external clouds. That does make life easier and although nobody speaks of the financial side, I believe this is an interesting tool to help in the cost and operation optimisation.

AI facing reality

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 09:18:44 GMT

Using AI to drive cost savings

The AI hype is all around us and yes, AI is starting to drive data center management.

The DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) is an important and integral part of the DC providing dashboard-delivered analytics for data center monitoring, asset management, and capacity planning. It helps simplify the complexity of hybrid environments, enhance productivity, and increase resource efficiency. DCIM monitors the health of the data center with power distribution metering, thresholds, and alerts, and it manages IT assets with auto-discovery tools.

DCIM’s need a vast array of sensors to collect the information and these developments are a very good step is ensuring better use of power and resources. But would it not be great if you could predict the future temperature and proactively react ?

Google has shown that they have able to reduce the amount of energy used for cooling with 40% through the use of predictive algorithms within the Google DeepMind programme. They tackled 3 issues:

1. the non-linear way in which different equipment reacts to each other

2. the influence of external changes – namely the weather

3. the influence of the specific architecture and environment of each individual DC

Especially the first two aspects are dynamic and using historical data to predict and proactively control your cooling is definitely the way to go, given the large saving Google shows.

What I do wonder then is: given a legacy site, you can install more sensors, you can install a DCIM and work on predictive algorithms but was the design of the DC such that you can precisely control what you need to, to achieve the savings.

Ah, nothing like reality to dampen a good idea.

More dumb pipes ?

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 14:28:36 GMT

Are NSP’s shooting themselves in the foot?Are NSP’s shooting themselves in the foot?

Equinix just released their new “Digital Edge Playbook”. This is a compactly written document which highlights the fact that network service providers (NSP) face growing competition, that these players are generally internally focused on their network capabilities and they should open up to a more hybrid approach, connecting several service providers globally.

The document stresses the need for more dispersed interconnect points or what Equinix calls metro interconnection hubs. They propose a path including offering services like network and security management leveraging a Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. They move on proposing that an NSP become reseller of all kinds of services like smart city and digital payment services.

I do not agree with all the statements and assumptions they make but the underlying message from Equinix is valid. SDN gives an NSP more and easier control of the traffic flows which helps position the NSP to be in a position to help their customers with traffic management and possibly security.

So funnily enough, every NSP and their grandmother is pushing SD-WAN and pushing relatively cheap equipment with customer self service network and security control. The NSP becomes more and more the dumb pipe while if they successfully leverage SDN services on behalf of their customers, they can move up the value chain and not down.

Oh yes and please do remind me to write a blog about SDN and ultra-responsive networks.

Designing with less over-specification

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 07:46:03 GMT

The role of regional data centres

At Telenology, we help companies with a variety of subjects relating to IT, Data centers and Telecom. And so we also get asked to assist in choosing data centres. Many data centres all try to look alike, featuring for example the highest levels of power security, access security, the lowest PUE, just to name a few. Essentially it is a big race in the more for more concept, more features at a higher price.

I believe that when data centres talk to their customers, they will hear the CTO of a company say that she wants the highest levels of service, the highest level of reliability and lower costs. When we get to sit down with CTO’s the discussion is different and we talk about multiple redundant locations, the different IT functions, the exact requirements for the applications and which data centre best fits these needs. Virtualisation and better transparent telecommunications have made customisation possible

So I see the need to lower spec data centres because if you are going to fork out the money for a virtualised and redundant set-up and the associated running costs, why pay double for an over-specified data centre. I believe that regional data centres with good connectivity to the major Internet hubs can play an increasingly important role.

SD-WAN and the underlying network

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 09:24:07 GMT

How the application is the starting point for the design

SD-WAN is being pushed by many dedicated SD-WAN service providers as being a significantly cheaper model than traditional MPLS networks. The reasoning they give is that SD-WAN uses public Internet as underlying network technology. The business case becomes clear in their eyes as they propose to rip out all the existing network hardware, replace it with their new SD-WAN hardware and it is all paid back with cheaper public Internet.

So it is very understandable that when we talk to our customers, they see a direct link between SD-WAN and your normal run of the mill DSL or COAX public Internet line.

The larger carriers are keen to point out that you can run SD-WAN over MPLS and also they are correct both in their statement and trying to protect their installed base.

So where it comes down to is: SD-WAN is flexible in the underlying network technology. Modern SD-WAN kit uses deep-packet inspection to see what kind if applications are running and so the kit can map the application onto the required port, be it an MPLS port or a public Internet port. So you can have a hybrid solution and it does not need to be hybrid at each location.

The nice thing is that the application is even more the starting point of your network design than ever and that your network design needs to be changeable to cater for changing applications. All possible.

Marseille – from landing station to content hub

Tue, 04 Dec 2018 13:24:13 GMT

How a small step now makes sense

For a long time the main places to peer outside of the US were London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Where London used to be the largest place to peer at the LINX about 10 years ago, slowly the AMX-IX took over this role and now Frankfurt houses the largest IX, DEC-IX running about 4 Tb/s on average and with peaks just under 7 Tb/s.

Asian and Middle Eastern carriers come to these places to peer and gain access to the world’s largest IP networks.

In the meantime, Interxion bought the SFR data centre in Marseille in 2014 and started upgrading it. Interxion even built a second data centre in an old submarine base (the picture above is Interxion MRS2 before being fitted out) with the opening of the first phase in May 2018. Marseille is naturally a very important place as it is the landing point for many sea cables running to the Middle East, India and Asia.

Interxion now says that the Marseille data centres are the Europe’s fastest growing content hubs as Asian Carriers start to pick up increasing amount of content there. Reduction in latency is a natural reason and there is a small cost saving in picking it all up in Marseille instead of Frankfurt.

What remains interesting is knowing the timeline when a lot of this content will start to be pushed out to the Middle East and Asia. The cost of sea cable capacity is still very high and that still weighs up having the content more local in the Middle East and Asia.

The TPU is literally out there

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 22:19:14 GMT

The rise of the xPU

An obvious way of modelling your machine learning application is using TensorFlow. Training the model is the heavy lifting of compute. Nvidia has had a good run with their GPU’s for training AI models while Intel claims that 80% of AI compute runs on their CPU. The last claim could be true because GPU’s are often used for training and CPU’s in the running of the model. Google, having developed TensorFlow, went a step further to develop and implement the TPU, the Tensor(Flow) Processing Unit to increase the computational efficiency of in TensorFlow models.

Now recently Google have scaled the power footprint of the TPU down to use it in the edge. People are starting to realise that there is so much data coming from devices that moving processing power out there may be a good idea. I think we are just seeing the start of application defined xPU’s, we may even run out of letters.

Affording not to ...

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 07:37:41 GMT

When price is not the issue.

I was at the Infosecurity event a few weeks ago in Utrecht. This event brings the IT security industry together and each of the stand holders has an even better security proposition than big stand next door. I always like the small stands at the side, the start-ups, the little gems and the disruptors.

There I found myself questioning myself that when a daily PEN-test costs 5 euro per month per IP address, who can afford NOT to have a daily security audit ?

Latency and local breakout

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 16:05:32 GMT

So what is driving the need for local breakout ?

Traditionally companies have used a hub an spoke model for their WAN networks. All spokes lead to the head-office with for example MPLS lines and there are the back office systems, the big firewalls and the internet access. This has worked for a lot of companies.

With the rise of SAAS, the use of G-Suite and Office 365, latency has become a major defining factor in user experience. In the traditional set-up, a packet goes via an (international) MPLS line to the head-office to and then to the SAAS provider introducing long and unnecessary latency.

This gives rise to the need for local breakout onto the public Internet in a bid to reduce latency and improve the user experience. Bypassing the the big head-office firewall naturally introduces a host of other issues. This is where a number of router and SD- WAN equipment suppliers are trying to add value and a whole new list of buzz words.

New website

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Our new website was due a long time now, so much has happened, so much has been done. With the new website, we now have the possibility to write about news, market developments and to express our opinions.