DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

Think hard drives have hit their storage limits, and should be replaced by solid-state units? You could be wrong.  Hard drives have been holding our data for nearly 70 years since IBM created the 350, which stored something like 4 Mbyte on dozens of spinning disks in a unit the size of a washing machine. Today's devices are orders of magnitude better on every axis including price, capacity, si...

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we break down the fundamentals of quantum computing - the different approaches out there, the challenges to bringing it into a widespread commercial reality, and the potential use cases that quantum may help with. To help divulge this, we speak to QuEra's Yuval Boger who shares a little about the company's experience with the technology, including how we c...

25 years ago, the first content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged, to solve a specific problem - how to make web pages load faster. More than two decades later, 72 percent of Internet content is delivered through CDNs. But the companies involved are still almost invisible - until something goes wrong. In 2021, in a  series  of  outages , large numbers of unrelated websites all went out of action at...

Europe has an Energy Efficiency Directive, Germany has an Energy Efficiency Act, and operators there can be fined for inefficiency. Meanwhile, Amsterdam has declared war on sleeping servers, and set limits on where facilities can be built. Across Europe, in response to congested electric grids and shortages of land, local governments are stepping in to regulate data centers. Sometimes they want th...

At the start of 2023, Yuval Bachar told us about his latest project - to build off-grid, hydrogen-powered data centers. As 2023 came to an end, he was back to tell us he'd done it. He's got 1MW of capacity fed by hydrogen in Mountain View California, and he's telling potential customers he can build the same thing anywhere you can get hydrogen shipped by pipe or tanker.  He's keen...

Ever wonder what it would be like to be a CEO at a telecom company in a country that is at war? That’s been the reality on a couple of occasions for Ineke Botter, who has headed telecom companies in Kosovo and Lebanon.  Her career has taken across Europe and beyond, spanning more than 30 years. She’s even worked in the data center industry too.  Listen to find out more about Ineke’s incredible jou...

The European data center market has a forecasted take-up of 440MW for 2023. But within the context of erratic power availability, moratoriums, and the need to move to renewable energy, the FLAP-D markets are facing several challenges. In this episode we talk to Neal Kalita about the obstacles facing those looking to build in Europe, and what the future holds for the region. Tune in for the convers...

Data centers need to be more sustainable, but finding consistent and powerful energy resources can be a challenge. Increasingly, we are seeing nuclear entering the conversation, in the form of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). But these aren't without their own controversies. In this episode, we talk with Compass Datacenters' Tony Grayson to discuss the future of SMRs, the challenges and oppo...

Artificial intelligence could grow from almost nothing to using half a percent of the world's electrical power within five years, according to Alex de Vries of Digiconomist. That's a crazy rate of growth, but it's not unprecedented. Bitcoin followed almost exactly the same trajectory, expanding from nothing to a sector whose energy use is comparable with that of regular data centers. B...

We talk to Bill Kleyman, now at machine learning company Neu.ro, about his lengthy data center career. How did he get into the sector, what did he learn at Switch, and how does he balance life and travel? Tune in to find out.

Data centers have outgrown their anonymity. They are large enough consumers of energy and space, that they have to enter the political landscape and justify their existence. But how do we know if a data really brings benefits to its location? In some places (like London), it appears that they soak up grid connection capacity and block housing projects. In others (like Denmark and Ireland) they use...

Ever wondered about the practical challenges of connecting our continents? In this podcast episode, we talk with Exa Infrastructure's Elena Badiola about the process of getting subsea cables underwater: from environmental surveys to climate change, to funding challenges. Elena also shares her experience of living on a cable ship for five weeks after an earthquake caused an outage - and how a m...

In 2022, Mark Monroe's podcast about hydrogen was one of our most popular podcasts ever. At Microsoft, Mark had just made a prototype hydrogen fuel cell UPS system that could potentially replace diesel generators to provide low-carbon backup power at data centers. One year on, he's back for some more detail. A hydrogen economy will need a distribution system - but will that look like a pow...

If you want to make infrastructure sustainable, you need to be very careful what words you use. That's what Hunter Vaughan and Nicole Starosielski found, through their involvement in a project to make subsea cables sustainable. Words like "sustainability" and "climate neutral" can mean different things, depending on who is talking. And if what you say is vague, then your ef...

If you think transitioning the tech sector to net zero is all about renewable energy and heat reuse, think again. Small changes in software could make entire data centers redundant - for a much bigger saving for the planet.  Green Software is not just about more efficient code, says Anne Currie. Rewriting everything in C might cut energy use - but it would destroy your company.   As a leader in th...

How does the Internet keep running? A close-knit community of engineers has been developing and supporting the protocols that support it for more than forty years. During that time, new Internet services have emerged and scaled beyond recognition, and new features have been added, all without breaking the whole system.  Mirjam Kuhne has been closely involved with this for 20 years, and in 2020 bec...

The global interests of the mobile industry are represented by the GSM Association (GSMA).  This governing body was established in 1995 to support mobile operators using the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard for cellular networks.  It has become synonymous with the mobile industry and has driven it forward through industry programs, working groups, and initiatives.  The GSMA’s...

Quantum computing is still pretty mysterious, but data center operators have real questions: when will they need installation and support? And how much cooling will they need? Chris Monroe, chief scientist at IonQ, gives us the answers, along with plenty of other solid facts about an emerging technology that can seem as illusory as Schrodinger's cat.  It turns out that quantum computing is rea...

There has been an ongoing issue with the representation of women in the tech industry, but why? In this episode, we talk to Kelley Mullick about her career to date, the factors that have helped her get to where she is, and the importance of supporting and empowering women to pursue these careers so they can find confidence within themselves. We also talk a little about her recent job change from I...

Having trouble finding a location for your data center project? This DCD podcast could have the answer. Build underground.  Andrew Bourget of Swiss engineering firm Eccus has a design for a 2MW data center built in an underground tunnel - and he can dig that tunnel wherever you want it, even under existing buildings.  The way he tells it, tunneling is the future. There's no planning permission...

In March this year, a swimming pool in Devon, UK, was the unlikely setting for the most widely covered data center story (so far) of 2023.  A small immersion-cooled high-performance computing module from Deep Green is giving its heat to the swimming pool, saving Exmouth Leisure Centres £20,000 ($24,000) per year. It's not the first time data center waste heat has been harnessed. It's not e...

Cloud gaming was heralded as the future of games, and was set to become a major data center workload. Now, after the death of Google Stadia and layoffs at Amazon's Luna, what's left for data center gaming? We catch up with Omdia's George Jijiashvili to discuss all things gaming, as well as VR, AR, and a dash of the metaverse.

As 2030 approaches, the pressure on data centers to meet their carbon pledges continues to increase. This, compounded with the challenge of energy supply insecurity and rising costs, is driving data centers to look to new methods of powering their operations, which has triggered nuclear power to come to the fore. However, as a result of historical disasters as well as the upfront costs, there is h...

As data center demands grow, hyperscalers are building out vast networks that will help define the future of how infrastructure is interconnected. In the latest episode of the DCD Zero Downtime podcast, we connect with Juniper Networks' group vice president of cloud-ready data center, Mike Bushong, to discuss what this means, and what we should expect next. Plus we discuss AI, silicon photonic...

Recently there’s been a number of mobile operators switching off their 3G networks around the world, or scheduling to phase out this old technology. 2G has also been spoken about at length, but has a slightly longer shelf-life than 3G, as it provides a backbone that still supports the IoT industry today. But what does any of this mean, and why does it matter? Well, Wireless Logic Group Chief Produ...