The race to build data centres to support AI and high-density computing requirements is on, and CyrusOne is helping redefine scalable data centre design with Intelliscale, its modular approach to support greater workloads.
“Intelliscale was engineered with adaptability at its core”, CyrusOne said when it launched its offering back in July, “building infrastructure that can evolve with your changing needs without starting from scratch or facing costly downtime.”
In terms of rack power density, AI workloads will require eight times the power of normal cloud workloads, up to 120 kW/rack, compared with 15W/rack, according to Dell’Oro Group. With Intelliscale data centres potentially occupying just a quarter of the space of typical data centres (depending on the application and needs), it’s designed for these extreme dense deployments and capable of delivering 100-plus megawatts of power, offering scalability, flexibility and reliability. Tom Kingham, Vice President of Engineering & Utilities, Europe at CyrusOne, believes data centre designs must both work for today and be flexible enough to accommodate future demands.
“We are not trying to completely rethink AI,” says Kingham. “What we’re trying to do is get ourselves to that modular element where we just deploy more of it depending on what the use case is for the customer in these data centres.”
With data centre builds taking years, and GPU refreshes coming in months, the timelines often don’t add up. “We had to come up with a way of being able to respond in a fast way to customer demands changing, without us necessarily having to fundamentally change the backbone of the equipment that’s going in,” notes Kingham. “So what you see from Intelliscale is that modular approach to a data centre.”
Kingham notes the ‘excitement’ about liquid cooling for GPUs. As the compute density is much greater for AI infrastructure, operational temperatures can be much higher. “That becomes interesting because we need less cooling to be able to make that work; therefore we need less energy,” he says. “So there’s some really good developments ahead for the data centre industry to reduce the impact we’re having.”
“The demand is so significant that the overall amount of energy we will use will grow, but hopefully we’re becoming much more efficient with it as that growth happens,” Kingham says.
Alongside energy efficiency, Kingham says the industry is getting better at giving back to the community. Local generation schemes are a good example; CyrusOne signed an industry-first Preferred Partnership agreement with E.ON in June which aims to provide power and cooling to the data centre and heat to the surrounding campus buildings at the same time. “It’s not just for the data centre,” says Kingham. “It should be for everyone in the vicinity.”
“What we’re seeing now through our development processes, as we find new sites and we want to develop in certain locations, we are being much more transparent about where our energy is going to come from,” says Kingham.
“I look at a project we have in Frankfurt at the moment where the data centre will provide all of the heat to the business park,” he adds. “I think that’s the sort of example where, as an industry, we really want to do the right thing. But when a data centre pops up where there isn’t that situation where you can offload your heat to a local network, because that network doesn’t exist, it’s a tricky one.
“So we’re now looking for those locations where we can be a much better community member, if you will, where we can provide heat to other local consumers.”
Tom Kingham is speaking at Data Centre Expo Europe, in Amsterdam on September 24-25. Find out more about his speaking session here.
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