Innovation in the cloud – who is making a difference

Cloud storage set out as a viable alternative to on-premise data storage enabling businesses to rely on data specialists to manage the infrastructure to meet their business needs.

PeaSoup set out to be a disrupter in the cloud market. ECO Cloud was designed to have a high-capacity and high-performance cloud infrastructure with a sustainable footprint. We innovated in the cloud market by implementing new and ground-breaking technologies.

Starting with employing a hyper-convergence cloud architecture from VMware, now effectively industry standard, and progressing to a highly tailored customer service. VMware recognised PeaSoup as the first cloud provider in Europe to be using a virtual SAN cloud platform designed for resilience and scalability.

Our cloud infrastructure uses liquid immersion cooling technology. This technology provides a much higher GPU and CPU performance and hugely reduces energy consumption compared to traditional air-cooled data centres.  With liquid immersion cooling PeaSoup has the ambition to convert the technology into the data centre standard.

This disruptive behaviour was all designed to deliver more efficient services to customers, find a way for IT services to help our planet and for us to live more sustainably.

But what other innovations are driving the cloud market? And who is making a difference?

GOOGLE

The cloud, indeed, all computing, has always had a problem with latency. Generally, the further away you are from a data centre the slower the transfer (of the data) tends to be. Google’s Mission Apollo, not to be confused with NASA’s Apollo Missions, has been quietly overhauling its data centres by replacing traditional network switches with optical circuit switches. Using light to transfer data rather than electrons – the technology that has been the dream of computer engineers since the dawn of the silicon era.

The UK is in the last throes of replacing all its old copper phone cables with optical cables which will see the entire country serviced by high-speed internet ensuring faster services for consumers and fully replacing an inefficient technology.

Optics have a higher bandwidth, some 100x higher than copper, and keeping communication in the light form will save Google billions, reduce its power use, and reduce latency. With huge knock-on effects for cloud infrastructure, this is an in-house solution that could be as revolutionary as liquid immersion cooling.

APAC (ASIA PACIFIC)

The entire Asia Pacific region is embracing the concept of multi-cloud. Companies utilising cloud infrastructure are moving towards a multi-cloud model because they offer improved flexibility and security, and you aren’t beholden to one, single cloud provider.

There is a lot to be positive about with multi-cloud setups but what is often overlooked is the intrinsic complexity of a multi-cloud setup. One fully leveraged, fully implemented cloud infrastructure is a complicated endeavour, throw in a host of other platforms and providers, and you’re presented with a major challenge.

The desire to not be obliged to one of the ‘big 3’ providers is understandable especially if you like to shop around for value, indeed the Competition Markets Authority in the UK is consulting on whether to open an investigation, due to the dominance of key players in the market.

Multi-cloud is an intriguing possibility, but the innovations will need to keep coming if it is to be truly viable technology moving forward.

PEASOUP CLOUD

The ECO Cloud is the go-to cloud service developed with sustainability in mind. You can run your toughest business applications and operations, benefit from highly available, scalable and secure cloud infrastructure and only pay for the resources that you need. The service is 60% more efficient and is 100% environmental. It’s innovative technology at its finest, and the concept is hyper-scalable.

Cloud computing and the servicing of multiple virtual machines are energy intensive, with the physical servers being the most power-hungry and emission-producing.

Emissions figures should be self-evident, but the ephemeral nature of the internet allows these emissions to remain almost hidden. PeaSoup set out to change this with liquid immersion cooling. Even under heavy load, liquid cooling allows the servers to run at a low temperature with consistent services maintained on the backend and reducing energy costs by 45%.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Perhaps a combination of all three technologies? A true liquid-cooled, light-speed, multi-ECO Cloud would be an exciting innovation facilitating huge savings, emissions reductions and value across a sector dominated by three big players. Maybe it’s time for the big companies and smaller companies to get their heads together, that might just be the biggest innovation of them all.