Intelligent Data Centres Issue 62 | Page 47

THOUGH HYPERSCALERS ARE LEADING THE CHARGE FOR MORE SPACE , POWER AND CONNECTIVITY , LARGE ENTERPRISE ORGANISATIONS ARE A FURTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR TO EXPLODING DATA CENTRE GROWTH .
F E A T U R E
Paul Mellon , Operations Director , Stellium Datacenters
Accelerating R & D
This is where standardisation and industry collaboration among technology vendors is already paying handsome dividends . For example , not too long ago , a data centre – albeit a fairly small one – might be considered to be a cluster

THOUGH HYPERSCALERS ARE LEADING THE CHARGE FOR MORE SPACE , POWER AND CONNECTIVITY , LARGE ENTERPRISE ORGANISATIONS ARE A FURTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR TO EXPLODING DATA CENTRE GROWTH .
of 50 to 100 racks with a combined IT load of 100kW . A single rack can now accommodate 100kW in normal chilled water cooling and this scales to 250kW with immersive cooling . These developments represent giant steps forward in terms of efficiency .
The Open Compute Foundation has been at the centre of such innovation , ensuring collaborative R & D is undertaken at such scale as to short circuit the development and standardisation process from decades to years – sometimes months . What used to be the preserve of a small number of mainframe computers , high power density
and cooling is now readily available at all levels in the data centre community .
Having originated from Facebook and several other technology companies ’ initiatives to create a data centre design that would significantly reduce cost and
boost efficiency , the OCP has since evolved into a global organisation with over 8,000 engineers with members such as Arm , Meta , Google , HPE , Inspur Systems , Intel , Microsoft and NVIDIA .
One major result of this visionary collaborative approach is the level and choice of high-power density and cooling now readily available at all levels in the data centre community . This has allowed the migration of millions of IT business environments to the cloud , delivering far greater efficiency in terms for lower power usage as well as flexibility on how organisations choose to manage their services along with robust SLA ’ s guaranteeing 99.98 % service availability .
Predictability
However , OCP ’ s mission has also evolved into supporting the core tenets of efficiency , impact , openness , scale and sustainability , therefore embracing a much wider vision and going well beyond optimising computing , storage and network efficiency .
Their OCP Ready certification programme for colocation data centres such as Stellium is a good example of this . Further accelerating the road to standardisation for hyperscale-class facilities , OCP
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