Cloud Hosting

We talk to the UKFast director about the UK cloud landscape and how companies can maximise efficiencies, protect critical data and ensure cloud costs are kept under control

Chris Folkerd is Director of Enterprise Technologies at UK cloud hosting company UKFast. Conceived in the bedroom of a tiny flat just off Manchesters Oxford Road over twenty years ago, UKFast has grown into a multi-million-pound business which, via its five UK data centres, hosts the critical infrastructure of a raft of big-name organisations, including Chester Zoo and the NHS.

As UKFast is such a pivotal figure in the UK cloud market, the company provides a useful barometer of the state of the nations cloud investments. Folkerd described the UK cloud market as vibrant and told me that strong uptake has now matured to wholesale adoption across the board.

This adoption is translating into greater maturity, he said. Companies are increasingly asking about containers and security, and have become more clued up about service providers and compliance obligations.

People are asking a lot about what containers are, how they can benefit business, or if the business is a bit further along its journey, how containers can be implemented alongside, or as an alternative to, traditional virtualised platforms, he added.

When it comes to security, Folkerd said customers are asking more questions about the security of UKFasts underlying architecture and infrastructure, and how they can go about reinforcing the security of their applications.

Despite growing maturity, Folkerd cautioned a lot of customers are still failing to get the most from cloud investments. He said enthusiasm about cloud should always be tempered by aligning adoption to business goals.

We like to keep customers focussed on achieving the end goal, rather than having a specific piece of buzzword technology they want to adopt or adopting lots of different services just because theyve read that theyre the next big thing, he said.

Another issue is that many companies are not picking cloud billing models that fit their needs, whether fixed monthly cost or elastic scaling.

While initial calculations may appear cost-effective, businesses can end up spending a lot more than initially planned when load and utilisation are factored in. For instance, if a customer on a PAYG model experiences rogue SQL queries which get stuck in a loop on a database server, it could cost them 50,000 overnight.

Making sure you pick the right providers means doing your research and working in consultation with them to choose the right technologies and then writing your code in a way that efficiently utilises those resources, Folkerd added.

There are lots of different ways of doing things in the cloud and its about making sure the one you adopt works for you, does what you need and is the most efficient. Having the right technology platform makes a big difference. It sounds obvious, but businesses get it wrong on a regular basis.

Another key piece of education Folkerd has for businesses is ensuring the cloud software stack is optimised for the hardware it sits on.

The first risk is efficiency. If hardware and software are not in sync, it can lead to wasted compute resources. Its not just about cost, but security, too. Folkerd said its crucial organisations have a full-stack view when developing in the cloud and work closely with providers to plug any gaps.

We always say security is a partnership. You can be sitting on the most secure, world-class infrastructure, but if your code is weak or poorly written, hackers will get in. Having a partnership around security, around resource provisioning, around technology and around APIs will help you get the most out of your platform.

Despite the rising popularity of cloud-native development and deployment, to take advantage of clouds potential in the coming decade, Chris said its still vital that organisations maintain a broad range of tech skillsets.

The popular skills at the moment are around serverless compute for rapid, dynamic, scalable applications and DevOps, he said. But at the same time, probably 80 percent of the code base out there isnt cloud native. So its really a spread bet across the entire tech spectrum.

One of Folkerds key messages for end-uses is around what he calls catastrophobia mitigating the dangers of outages with disaster recovery and ensuring applications are designed with high-availability in mind whether thats local site in the event of hardware failure, geographic resilience, or for performance capabilities when serving customers in different locations.

Theres a lot of different strategies out there and lots of different vendors offering different solutions. Have a chat with our UKFast teamto make sense of the different options best for you.

Link:
Pushing the cloud to the limit, with UKFast's Chris Folkerd - Techerati

Dublin, March 19, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market, by Component, by Organization Size, by Application, by End-user, by Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2019-2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market size is expected to reach $27 billion by 2025, rising at a market growth of 33.2% CAGR during the forecast period.

Hyper-converged technology has gained momentum in the early stages of development because of its ability to provide virtual desktops. With the ever-increasing digital data and diversified sources, companies are moving towards high-performance, alongside a linear scaling architecture that is the primary focus of hyper-converged infrastructure. As the hyper-converged architecture has grown from traditional server workloads such as web servers, regular software, research & development to mission critical workloads such as SAP, SQL, and Oracle, the industry has achieved high adoption rates that influence market growth positively.

The need for scalable infrastructure with increasing demand for architectures, which can manage heavy workloads, like business analytics and big data tools, are some of the key drivers in the growth of the global hyper-converged infrastructure market. Major business leaders push companies to embrace software-centric architecture that lets them incorporate, process, and store in a single suite. This encouraged leading virtualization providers to move towards hybrid cloud solutions to help their customers migrate transactional workloads to the public cloud and execute heavy workloads, typically mission-critical on-premise.

The major strategies followed by the market participants are Partnerships. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix, IBM Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and Microsoft Corporation are some of the forerunners in the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market. Companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Fujitsu Limited, and Dell Technologies, Inc., Nutanix, Inc., NetApp, Inc., NEC Corporation, and Hitachi, Ltd. are some of the key innovators in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Market.

Partnerships, Collaborations, and Agreements

Acquisition and Mergers

Product Launches and Product Expansions

Market Segmentation

By Component

By Organization Size

By Application

By End-user

Companies Profiled

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/g27vxt

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

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Global Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Markets to 2025 - IBM, Cisco, Huawei and Microsoft are the Forerunners of this $27 Billion-Projected Industry -...

High-density racks will become more common as AI gains traction. (Photo: Rich Miller)

Will high-density, liquid-cooled racks become more common in data centers? Thats todays topic as we continue our Data Center Executive Roundtable, a quarterly feature showcasing the insights of thought leaders on the state of the data center industry, and where it is headed. In todays discussion, our panel of experienced data center executives Iron Mountains Michael DeVito, Chris Sharp of Digital Realty, Kristen Kroll-Moen from Chatsworth Products, Intels Jeff Klaus, Gary Niederpruem of Vertiv, and Amber Caramella of Netrality and Infrastructure Masons discuss trends in rack power density and their implications for design and operations.

The conversation is moderated by Rich Miller, the founder and editor of Data Center Frontier.

Data Center Frontier:Last year several studies indicated that rack density level is increasing. How might the growing use of artificial intelligence and edge computing impact rack density and the world of data center cooling?

GARY NIEDERPRUEM, Vertiv

Gary Niederpruem:What we are seeing from our customers is that average rack densities arent rising dramatically for many operators. But in select applications, such as AI, extremely high densities are becoming more common. Thats created an interesting environment where you have some users with relatively stable densities and some with densities that werent even practical 10 years ago. This is occurring both within the core data center and on the edge.

From a cooling perspective, operators need the ability to efficiently cool facilities that support standard density racks (5 kW to 8 kW), high density racks (30 kW and higher), and have some mix of both. Key to accomplishing that is being able to adapt the right cooling technology to the application.

Vertiv is enabling this by offering a range of different technologies that include air-based, compressor-based and liquid-based cooling. That has given high-performance computing facilities, for example, the flexibility to design racks around their specific requirements and then adapt the appropriate cooling technology rather than designing racks based on the capacity of their cooling system.

KRISTEN KROLL-MOEN, Chatsworth Products

Kristen Kroll-Moen: As rack density increases, airflow management becomes critical in traditional air-cooled facilities. In the late 2000s, the industry was projecting significant rack density increases. CPI conducted lab tests to observe and verify performance of airflow management technology and we discovered that air cools very dense racks, up to 30 kW, with disciplined airflow management. Since then, there have been more hardware improvements: hard drives have transitioned to solid state, power supplies have increased in efficiency, and equipment operating ranges have widened.

These improvements provide even more opportunity to accommodate new computing with traditional airflow cooling models. Where space is limited, perhaps in edge sites or where there is a high-density compute node, an alternative is to shift to liquid cooling, either supplemental indirect cooling, or direct liquid cooling. The challenge for enterprise operators is the availability of off-shelf direct liquid cooled solutions.

AMBER CARAMELLA, Netrality Data Centers and Infrastructure Masons.

Amber Caramella:As artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing proliferate, rack density will continue to increase. More data-intensive workloads naturally require more compute power, which increases the amount of electricity used by servers and the amount of heat the servers produce. This makes powering and cooling data centers more expensive and increases their carbon footprint.

Conventional data center cooling methods will not scale under the processing demands of AI, 5G wireless, Internet of Things (IoT), and the rise of Smart Cities. Luckily, there are a growing number of new approaches to cooling that actually reduce energy consumption and costs. As data center needs transform, dynamic infrastructure is needed to respond to high, mixed and variable power densities, enabling environments to evolve without stranding capacities. Newer cooling systems are being developed that are purpose-built for data centers.

These and other promising new cooling methods will be needed to ensure that data centers can keep up with data processing demands and become more green and sustainable.

CHRIS SHARP, CTO, Digital Realty

Chris Sharp:With the explosion of AI and IoT in the enterprise, data gravity has become one of the biggest challenges to successful digital transformations. The explosive growth of data means it is now heavier, denser, and more expensive to move. At the same time, these new technologies require data centers to support a higher level of computational power, electricity usage, and heat generation, requiring specialized power and cooling techniques that arent available in the enterprise basement.

Organizations across all industries are using AI to meet business challenges and increase efficiency. Its also important to note that not every colocation facility is prepared to support these compute-intensive technologies in a multi-tenant environment. Per-rack power demands for AI can easily and regularly do exceed what standard data centers can deliver. To put into context, the average kilowatt per rack is around 7kW, but with AI, applications can pull more than 30 kW per rack. As per-rack power demands rise, so does the need for highly efficient cooling.

One of the ways data center operators are addressing these data-intensive technologies is through various next-generation cooling technologies, including liquid cooling and direct air cooling. While it isnt the right fit for all workloads, liquid cooling enables ultra-high-density equipment be deployed in otherwise low- or medium-density facilities, essentially retrofitting a data center for future applications.

As part of our commitment to lead the data center into the future, were partnering with companies like Submer Technologies to help customers evaluate the potential applications of new cooling technologies and support their future data center infrastructure needs.

MICHAEL DeVITO, Iron Mountain

Michael DeVito:At the high level, AI requires a lot of processing. It must go through many different data sets quickly and requires algorithms capable of processing that data.

Along with the demand for low latency and high processing comes greater compute capability. This will increase the power required at the rack level. Once you increase power at the rack level, you must be able to cool it.

As the need for greater cooling grows, data centers must ensure we are doing this efficiently. As we consume more and more cooling, we need to be cognizant of any waste and operate in the most sustainable manner possible. Finding sustainable sources of power are key.

JEFF KLAUS, Intel

NEXT: Our panel discusses the data center industrys progress on diversity.

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Pockets of Density Will Be More Common in Future Data Centers - Data Center Frontier