https://www.business-reporter.co.uk/2019/05/20/peasoup-polluting-the-uk-market-with-the-eco-cloud/
There has been a lot of hype and buzz about the cloud and its “as a services” for at least 10 years now. We have had thousands of write-ups about private versus public versus hybrid over and over again. The average business owner and the consumer should understand the terminology by now, so let’s concentrate more on the facts about where the cloud is hosted – environmentally.
We know that the data centre market is still growing fast, and companies ping their data in and out to the cloud pretty effortlessly nowadays. Okay, there are some restrictions, such as bandwidth, speed, CPUs, cloud architecture and location, to name a few, that businesses tend to manage either by themselves or on request from the provider. We won’t concentrate on this aspect either, but we will highlight the environmental infrastructure of data centres – particularly with cloud data centres.
Did you know that by signing a new contract with one of the traditional cloud providers you have signed for the carbonised cloud? The big names such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft, to name just the most recognizable ones, offer ridiculously cheap examples of today’s cloud trends – “blob” “cluster”, you name it. But they’re based mostly on legacy cooling architecture – or carbonised, “polluted” cloud.
Most of the traditional data centres used by cloud providers such as those mentioned above use an antiquated air-cooling method to cool their IT infrastructure. This technique requires huge amounts of power to work efficiently without temperature outages, with raised floors that help to spread fire quickly and with an unmanageable backup UPS power station that runs on dirty diesel fuel. On top of this will likely be new gadgets such as humidifiers that have been installed to help replicate an optimal atmosphere, and more. All this hardware needs separation and placement to avoid overheating, as well as power, power and more power.
So are there more environmentally friendly data centre cooling solutions available?
The answer is yes, and lies in liquid and immersed cooling. These methods have proved to be an excellent substitute for legacy cooling methods. PeaSoup, a company with a heritage of disrupting the cloud market by being the first in Europe to use hyper-converged technology, is again innovating in the cloud market by using ultra-modern, green data centres for its eco-friendly cloud services.
Hyper-converged technology offers organisations a way to make their IT infrastructure more agile and efficient, and it’s suitable for any workload that might have typically been hosted in a virtualised environment. Hyper-convergence supports highly distributed environments, such as businesses with hundreds of small branch locations. When companies need additional computing capacity or storage capacity, they simply add more nodes/pods to their cloud cluster.
The new green data centre in Lincoln is the fifth most environmentally friendly data centre in Europe. This has been achieved by removing the constraints of traditional air-cooling methods and substituting them with liquid and immersed technology. This revolutionary technique reduces power requirements by a massive 44 per cent when compared with a traditional data centre. The data centre is powered from a CHP (combining heat and power) unit, reducing heat wastage in power generation to as little as 10 per cent, so it only relies on the national grid as its failover power supply, completely turning traditional data centre designs on their head. Moreover, by swapping air conditioning with liquid and immersed cooling, this technology not only cools the IT infrastructure more efficiently but also creates a transferable heat source that can be used to heat and power other buildings in the vicinity of the data centre.
PeaSoup has investigated immersed (liquid) cooling technology, and following two years of intensive soak testing, the results have proved the stability and reliability PeaSoup requires to deliver a top-quality cloud service based on innovative design. There are many benefits in terms of the technology and PeaSoup are excited to be one of the first companies in Europe to deliver a fully operational cloud service using the immersed technology. By immersing the servers in liquid, the technology is clean and can house the entire hyper-converged cloud infrastructure, including power and network components. It improves thermal exchange, removing swings or hot spots and allowing the hardware to operate in a more efficient state. It also removes the risks of hardware failure from dust contamination or fire.
The move to green technology has been initiated by market expectations and high level of consumer awareness when it comes to low-carbon. This method helps to reduce environmental impact and improve cloud resilience, allowing for demanding applications to run smoothly.
PeaSoup delivers extremely cost-efficient cloud services with greatly reduced power consumption and more reliable hardware. This is based on VMWare’s award-winning hyper-convergence architecture, giving companies additional cloud infrastructure simplifications and data security by removing the risks of hard disk failure normally associated with legacy cloud platforms. This is excellent news for all companies seeking a 99 per cent improvement uptime of high-value services.