< Previouschallenges in the availability and preparing of data. A business cannot become data-driven, if it doesn’t understand the information it has and the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is especially true when it comes to the data used for AI. With many organisations still on the starting blocks, or having not yet entirely finished their journey to become data driven, there appears to be a misplaced assumption that they can quickly and easily leap from being in the process of preparing their data to implementing AI and ML, which realistically, won’t work. To successfully step into the world of AI, businesses need to firstly ensure the data they are using is good enough. AI in the data centre Over the coming years, we are going to see a tremendous investment in large scale and High-Performance Computing (HPC) being installed within organisations to support data analytics and AI. At the same time, there will be an onus on data centre providers to be able to provide these systems without necessarily understanding the infrastructure that’s required to deliver them or the software or business output needed to get value from them. We saw this in the realm of big data, when everyone tried to swing together some kind of big data solution and it was very easy to just say we’ll use Hadoop to build this giant system. If we’re not careful, the same could happen with AI. There have been many conversations about the fact that if we were to peel back the layers of many AI solutions, we’ll find that there are still a lot of people investing a lot of hard work into them, so when it comes to automating processes, we aren’t quite in that space yet. AI solutions are currently very resource heavy. There’s no denying that the majority of data centres are now being asked how they provide AI solutions and how they can assist organisations on their AI journey. Whilst organisations might assume that data centres will have everything to do with AI tied up. Is this really the case? Yes, there is a realisation of the benefits of AI, but actually how it is best implemented, and by who, to get the right results, hasn’t been fully decided. Solutions to how to improve the performance of large- scale application systems are being created, whether that’s by getting better processes, better hardware or whether it’s reducing the cost to run them through improved cooling or heat exchange systems. But data centre providers have to be able to combine these infrastructure elements with a deeper understanding of business processes. This is something very few providers, as well as Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are currently doing. It’s great to have the kit and use submerged cooling systems and advanced power mechanisms but what does that give the customer? How can providers help customers understand what more can be done with their data systems? How do providers differentiate themselves and how can they say they harness these new technologies to do something different? It’s easy to go down the route of promoting that ‘we can save you X, Y, Z’ but it means more to be able to say ‘what we can achieve with AI is..X, Y, Z‘. Data centre providers need to move away from trying to win customers over based solely on monetary terms. AI and machine learning www.networkseuropemagazine.com 30Education and collaboration When it comes to AI, there has to be an understanding of what the whole strategic vision is and looking at where value can be delivered and how a return on investment (ROI) is achieved. What needs to happen is for data centre providers to work towards educating customers on what can be done to get quick wins. Additionally, sustainability is riding high on the business agenda and this is something providers need to take into consideration. How can the infrastructure needed for emerging technologies work better? Perhaps it’s with sharing data between the industry and working together to analyse it. In these cases, maybe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The hard bit is going to be convincing people to relinquish control of their data. Can the industry move the conversation on from being purely technical and around how much power and kilowatts are being used to how is this helping our social corporate responsibility/ our green credentials? There are some fascinating innovations already happening, where lessons can be learnt. In Scandinavia for example, there are those who are building carbon neutral data centres, which are completely air cooled, with the use of sustainable power cooling through solar. The cooling also comes through the building by basically opening the windows. There are also water cool data centres out there under the ocean. Conclusion We saw a lot of organisations and data centres jump in head first with the explosion of big data and not come out with any tangible results – we could be on the road to seeing history repeat itself. If we’re not careful, AI could just become another IT bubble. There is still time to turn things around. As we move into a world of ever-increasing data volumes, we are constantly searching for the value hidden within low value data that is being produced by IoT, smartphone apps and at the edge. As the global costs of energy rise, and the numbers of HPC clusters powering AI to drive our next generation technologies increase, new technologies have to be found that lower the cost of running the data centre, beyond standard air cooling. It’s great to see people thinking outside of the box on this, with submerged HPC systems and full, naturally aerated data centres, but more will have to be done (and fast) to meet up with global data growth. The appetite for AI is undoubtedly there but for it to be able to be deployed at scale and for enterprises to see real value, ROI and new business opportunities from it, data centres need to move the conversation on, work together and individually utilise AI in the best way possible or risk losing out to the competition. n ADIABATIC AND FREE COOLING SOLUTIONS FOR DATA CENTRES Proven Low Carbon Solution | Trusted UK Manufacturer EcoCooling FRESH AIR COOLING CloudCooler by EcoCooling systems are used by some of the world’s most efficient data centres including Hydro66, CGG, BT and the H2020 funded Boden Type One DC. Visit our website for more details SAVE UP TO 90% ON YOUR COOLING COSTS www.ecocooling.co.uk sales@ecocooling.co.uk 01284 810 586 AI and machine learning www.networkseuropemagazine.com 31Prakash Mana CPO & CTO Pulse Secure Before the crisis began - remote working was a business trend that was gaining steam. The added flexibility of being able to work from wherever or whenever is appealing to both employers and employees. As such many enterprises provided modest capacity for day to day remote working - while keeping the majority of the workforce within the brick and mortar walls of the office. That movement began quickly at the beginning of this year. When the crisis began, entire workforces were sent home to ensure business continuity. A daily reality We don’t yet know when we’ll fully return to the office. Consultancy firm Hoxby recently released data showing that 59 percent of office workers believe that they will be remote working for the next six months. When lockdowns start to lift they believe that remote working will likely stay in place, at least in some form. Nearly a quarter believe that remote working will become a daily reality for them and just over ten percent believe that work will become entirely remote. But the current situation can also be seen as an acceleration of the trends towards which enterprise IT was already heading. The 2019 Global Workplace Survey - showed that 75 percent of office workers considered working outside of the office to be “the new normal.” The long and short term changes towards remote working are underpinned by a larger move away from hardware based solutions and towards software driven ones. In this current moment businesses need scalable Secure Access quickly. When an enterprise IT team needs to onboard hundreds of new users onto a VPN overnight - they simply cannot wait to deploy and scale an expensive piece of hardware. We can find the seeds of that change in the broader trends of IT - mass movement towards the Hybrid Cloud for example. Pulse Secure’s 2019 State of Enterprise Secure The global public health pandemic is putting the world under a serious stress test across all industries and departments. This is especially true in IT, where the rapid change to remote working is becoming a business resiliency norm. Global remote working forces a move from hardware to software remote working www.networkseuropemagazine.com 32Access report found that 26 percent of enterprises used a mixture of data centre, private and public cloud to deliver IT. That number is set to grow too. A significant amount of enterprise resources and data is now up in the cloud - 90 percent of companies are using the cloud in some form according to 451 research. Furthermore, 60 percent of workloads are running on a hosted cloud service. The rise of cloud, virtualisation, Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and “everything as a service” has unmoored the enterprise environment with a faster migration from traditional data centres to the cloud – especially since COVID-19. Security must be equally agile and enterprises require Secure Access solutions which can be flexibly deployed and scale within hybrid IT environments and multi-cloud. Elastic data protection This means that conventional perimeter defences must be supplemented with more agile, elastic data protection approaches. Increasingly popular Secure Access concepts like Zero Trust are built on the notion that apps and workloads may no longer be fixed to specific locations and more likely are cloud-distributed. An evolved architecture needs to protect the data and resources wherever it is stored and however it is requested. Zero Trust offers a “verify first before grant” methodology that aligns to today’s digital transformation efforts and mobile workforce. The security and flexibility provided by software-defined Secure Access solutions are more likely to be extended whenever the world returns to some kind of normality. As remote working and work from home flexibility will become the new normal. While many organisations will continue to invest in hardware, the deployment, scale and availability benefits of virtualisation and the cloud will be a more compelling investment. Niche cases So, will hardware solutions go away completely? That’s unlikely. Hardware based solutions will still be used in niche cases like running big-data solutions, as well as legacy enterprise applications. Many legacy applications that enterprises rely upon have not made its way to the cloud. In these cases, hardware may continue to be employed, but increasingly for niche purposes. The perimeter has moved and transformed. Increased remote working is helping fuel migration to virtual, cloud and hybrid computing. The traditional data centre, and the brick-and-mortar office, must make way to utility computing as the new digital enterprise requires greater apps, resources and data deployment flexibly and scale. Workers must be able to securely use cloud apps in their home, as easily as they do in a coffee shop. To mitigate added risks, Secure Access must go beyond password management and incorporate multi-factor authentication, always-on VPN, security posture checking and behaviour analytics as part of a Zero Trust defence. While hardware will remain a mainstay for some organisations and legacy applications, IT will surely take advantage of virtualisation and cloud – the current health crisis will merely accelerate the journey. n Global remote working forces a move from hardware to software remote working www.networkseuropemagazine.com 33How data centre operators can reduce energy consumption The role of cooling technologies in the transition towards green data centres Supermicro Data Centers & the Environment Report energy consumption www.networkseuropemagazine.com 34In today’s data-driven economy, businesses and data centres are facing the battle of efficiency; finding the balance between an efficiently-run data centre which can handle the exponential amounts of data being produced every minute, yet also being aware of the environmental impact of the performance, scale and value of the installed servers. While only about 12 percent of today's data centres are green, or environmentally friendly, in recent years IT managers have learned that a more sustainable approach to IT infrastructure would help the environment by reducing e-waste, plus it would save data centre operators millions of dollars. The question is, how can data centres run an energy-efficient operation and still meet the performance expectations of global businesses when data usage only continues to escalate? Green Data Centres Green data centres are designed to minimise energy use and environmental impact, and are architected to use less electric power, which provides significant cost savings in comparison to a traditional data centre. More and more server suppliers, for example, have focused on helping data centres to improve energy efficiency by reducing e-waste and costly overheads significantly. Increased Rack Power Density & Resource Saving Architecture. IT managers are constantly seeking suppliers of high- performance, cost-effective and energy-efficient products for their data centres. A very effective way to optimise data centre power, cooling, shared resources and refresh cycles is by utilising resource- saving architectures. This overall design uses a disaggregated design to enable server resources to be refreshed independently to eliminate the costly refresh cycles so commonly known to data centre operators. Implementation of this architecture has resulted in significant reductions in hardware costs and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). A 2019 green data centre survey from Supermicro indicated that refreshing server processors and memory following the rapid improvement cadence for silicon, while updating other server subsystems far less often, can annual performance and efficiency improvements to at least 15%. As a result, corporate compute demands and company goals are met while CAPEX savings can be equal to $900K per year for an average sized data centre. In addition to this Supermicro initiative of disaggregated resource-saving architecture, data centre operators should be aware of rack power densities in their journey to be more green. By fitting more servers into a smaller space, systems such as multi- node servers or blade systems utilise shared power and cooling infrastructure (power supplies and fans) which can result in 10-20% more efficient computing than traditional rackmount servers. Cooling Technologies Another opportunity for green power effectiveness are cooling technologies. In the data centre, cooling solutions are used to maintain optimal operating conditions. However, the cooling and power equipment used in data centres contribute to increased energy usage, making technologies to maintain sustainable and efficient cooling increasingly important. One technology to reduce data centre electric power is free-air cooling. Many data centres currently cool the hot air generated by servers by using refrigeration equipment. However, by using outside air, or free-air cooling, energy and cost savings can be significant. In the 2019 Supermicro green data centre survey, respondents from the IT industry indicated that many data centres are adopting this cooling design. Within the survey, data centre server inlet temperatures were studied as a measure of green data centre free-air cooling to reduce PUE and increase green power efficiency. It was reported that 51% of respondents operated their data centre temperatures between 21°C - 24°C. At the time of the survey, the average data centre temperature was between 23°C-24°C. In addition to the free-air cooling method, liquid cooling is becoming more popular. This approach can be more efficient than standard air cooling. Liquid cooling solutions significantly reduce data centre power consumption and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and can increase the processing performance per square foot beyond what is possible using air cooling techniques, which in turn increases data centre capacity. Warm-water cooling solutions enable high-density server racks, with high-performance server systems, to realise significant reductions in PUE. In comparison to traditional forced-air cooling, liquid cooling methods can reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 50% due to improved fan and power supply efficiencies. Outlook According to Supermicro’s 2019 green data centre report, only 12% of the world’s data centres are green. Therefore, the opportunity for the industry to significantly reduce the environmental impact of data centres, while achieving incredible cost savings, is not only huge but vital in the fight to save our Mother Earth. With the right education, the right attitudes and the right technology, that low percentage can increase. Green data centres have the potential to reduce environmental impact by over 80%, equivalent to saving enough energy to keep the lights on in Las Vegas for 37 years. Now, how cool would that be? n How data centre energy consumption www.net-work- seuropemagazine.com 35Future proof resilience future proof resilience www.networkseuropemagazine.com 36The Resilience Imperative, a report by Sungard Availability Services examines some of the greatest threats to organisational resilience today and their effect on business leaders within the UK and Ireland. Cyber-attacks (53%) within the UK and network failure (56%) within Ireland were the top crises leaders surveyed and believed were most likely to threaten their organisation in 2019. For organisations surveyed, the financial impact of downtime equated on average to £1,105,000 a year. Whilst data centre owners and operators have always sought to mitigate the risks of downtime highlighting the financial impact or reputational damage, increasingly the potential risk to life and the extent to which digital communication underpins the way we live and work is undeniable. The question is not are technology leaders prepared, the question is how prepared? The same research also highlights the important intrinsic relationship between a resilient infrastructure and leadership, raising the personal imperative as an area of most concern. “In the face of technological disruptions, 57% of respondents (54% in the UK and 62% in Ireland) admit to suffering from stress-related illnesses and/or damage to their mental well-being in the event of a crisis.” The challenge of this decade will be how to prepare for the unknown. The convergence of increased data usage and reliance on digital technology calls upon organisations of the future to be resilient in both their critical infrastructure and their calibre of leadership. IP House Future proof resilience for the data centre of tomorrow future proof reslilience www.networkseuropemagazine.com 37How to help CIOs and CTOs prepare for the unknown The 2020 State of the CIO Executive Summary by IDG cited that CEOs top priorities for CIOs were to lead digital business/digital transformation initiatives (39%) and to upgrade IT and data security to boost corporate resiliency (31%). The report also highlighted that 89% of IT leaders “believe the CIO increasingly needs to rely on trusted advisors to help navigate emerging technologies, processes and methodologies”. One of the key components of working with clients to establish their short term and future strategy is to simply listen. A conversation will naturally evolve from discussing what clients say they need to reach an in-depth understanding of what they are ultimately trying to achieve. This is a pivotal point for success. In providing technical advice focused on improving resilience, honesty is crucial. Clients know what they want, but do not know how to select the right solution to put in place. Is the objective for an organisation to move to the cloud? Move their entire infrastructure off-premise? After mapping overall strategic objectives to exact infrastructure requirements, cost efficiencies and savings will arise out of evaluating a breadth of options on behalf of the client for consideration. Can migrating to a colocation or hybrid environment solve future resiliency challenges? The National Infrastructure Commission’s (NIC) Resilience Study highlights that for specific strategies and plans within the digital sector “Operators are accountable for decisions related to the implementation of network architecture, network resilience, capacity, and design choices that affect connectivity and performance.” Clients need their critical infrastructure to be running 24/7/365 no matter what is going on in the world. Carrier neutral data centres can provide connections from multiple carriers to a single client, depending on the levels of resiliency that they require. A core component of providing data centre resilience is ensuring secure backup power and provisioning UPS’ and generator sets that can be maintained for a specific period whilst a major outage occurs. Additionally, having a fuel supply contract in place ensures generators can run at peak capacity whilst any power outages are resolved. This safeguards that all critical operations from a client’s perspective can function as if nothing has happened. The benefits of hosted solutions are not solely about the assurance of uptime and business continuity through agreed SLAs, it is also about the far-reaching support – clients need their critical infrastructure to be running 24/7/365 no matter what is going on in the world – future proof resilience www.networkseuropemagazine.com 38network. Colocation facilities can have an extensive list of recommended partners behind them. These partnerships can yield substantial cost savings for clients from procuring IT equipment to engaging migration companies. Accenture’s Third Annual State of Cyber Resilience report describes a cyber-resilient business as bringing together the capabilities of cybersecurity, business continuity and enterprise resilience, and highlights the prevailing issue for 69% of respondents who say staying ahead of attackers is a constant battle and the cost is unsustainable. It is essential that preventative maintenance measures, therefore, are in place to ensure clients are fully aware of any potential problems before they arise. Critical infrastructure designed for minimal intervention and AI enabled remote monitoring decreases the potential for outages. Response times to customer issues, currently achievable within the hour for some facilities, will continue to lessen. Modular data centres also enable clients to scale efficiently. By gradually increasing UPS capacity, data suites and racks, capital expenditure (CapEx) can be reinvested to allow businesses to adapt to unforeseen situations. The modular approach also allows for the most current technologies to be deployed throughout the data centres infrastructure, whilst colocation facilities that grow in parallel to demand are often able to offer those cost savings back to customers, as they are not looking to make a quick return on money already invested. Customers and providers are looking for the same longevity, security, and trust in their business relationship, making quick wins over a three-year tenure is of no mutual benefit. It is potentially challenging and costly to migrate from one data centre to another. Your investment as a client should be focused on your power, footprint, cable installation and cross connect services. Ensure additional fees are not going to surprise you especially for consultancy advice, providers should be looking for where they can make overall efficiency and cost savings for you. Over time it’s about helping CIOs and CTOs to move their technology infrastructure to a place that is more responsive, agile and adaptive to change. Uptime defined by the end-user Modelling and defining the criticality of business applications will become less and less of a factor in acceptable levels of tolerance for outages. Most non- essential services are often multi-site and have a resilient failover configuration. End-users expectations are at an all-time high. Uninterrupted service and lower latency will increasingly be driven by the customer experience, the risk and reputational damage within an era of social media cannot be downplayed as in the past. Savvy gamers and streamers see continuity of service in the same way as expecting water when they turn on the tap. Many facilities provide 99.999% uptime, but it is important to remember for most this means that a single feed is energised to the rack footprint at any one time. Combining in-rack ATS’s and dual power feeds, can provide extra crucial levels of resiliency right from the incoming feeds all the way through to the rack level distribution. This can save businesses a lot of time, money and effort should downtime occur. The most critical verticals will be in industries such as healthcare, sciences, finance and defence. This is where it comes down to individual organisations determining how important resiliency is. Maintaining and striving for highest levels of resiliency has to be evident within business continuity planning, disaster recovery and cybersecurity risk assessments. Senior executives that continually review their organisation’s resilience levels will be the most proactive in determining their own pace of transformation. Resilient leadership Through difficult circumstances, approaches to how we work and lead businesses within the technology sector will need to adapt. This was the whole point with digital transformation – it requires diverse styles of leadership encompassing agility, innovation and resilience. Traditional business leaders limited by antiquated ways of thinking will be less receptive to change. For previous generations working from home used to be unheard of, until now when approaches to remote working have altered almost overnight. There are outliers, but very few. Diversity continues to be a concern when addressing the future skills gaps. However, the landscape of leadership is changing, emerging from a generation that owned a mobile phone at a young age and continues to grow with new technologies. The next generation of leaders comprehend and take responsibility for the fact that they will have the most impact in looking at ways to change the world. They are building on the valuable work of their predecessors of the last 30 years, thinking and working in new dimensions to explore how to achieve solutions in more efficient ways. The difference is having the courage to implement innovations and fail fast if necessary to achieve efficiency, cost savings and resiliency. When you surround yourself with a team that innovates, the way you use technology is different. A component of being a trusted advisor is making customers more comfortable to change and new approaches. Things shift almost on a daily basis in terms of technology, it’s something that we need to adapt and embrace. n – digital transformation requires diverse styles of leadership encompassing agility, innovation and resilience – – things shift almost on a daily basis in terms of technology, it's something we need to adapt and embrace – future proof resilience www.networkseuropemagazine.com 39Next >