Nuclear power may have its detractors, but amid a growing capacity crunch data center operators are becoming increasingly interested in whether atoms can provide the electrons needed to power tomorrow's high-density facilities. In this episode, Chris Lohse of the Idaho National Laboratory, talks about the recent innovations around nuclear power, the highs and lows of recent years, and what the future might hold for nuclear-powered data centers ..read more

Sustainability needs to be applied at all levels of the data center industry, and we are not doing enough, says John Booth of Carbon3IT.  In this episode of Zero Downtime, we sit down with sustainability consultant John Booth to talk about how he got where he is in his career, and the fundamental sustainability issues that he is seeing in the data center industry.  We also talk about a past trip to Belarus that proved more exciting than expected. Tune in now for the latest episode ..read more

Bringing the L to FLAP-D, the UK has a prominent data center market. But like all other tier-one markets, London is struggling with space and power capacity. Because of this, the UK's data center industry will have to diversify, all while meeting increasingly regimented regulations. In this episode, we talk to trade association TechUK's Luisa Cardani about what the UK's data center industry is currently experiencing, from upcoming rules and regulations to emerging new markets, to the association's role in influencing policy.  ..read more

Oxide Computer has been rebuilding the rack. In this podcast, CTO Bryan Cantrill tells us why.  The data center industry has been building its own infrastructure for years, with the wrong components. Servers weren't designed to be operated in data centers, and the 1U rack unit is the wrong size, because of simple science. Part of the success of the cloud is that it takes that integration away, and gives users an easily consumed set of virtual servers and elastic infrastructure. But it costs, and it has pushed users to renting something they would be better off owning.  ..read more

Think hard drives have hit their storage limits, and should be replaced by solid-state units? You could be wrong.  Hard drives have been holding our data for nearly 70 years since IBM created the 350, which stored something like 4 Mbyte on dozens of spinning disks in a unit the size of a washing machine. Today's devices are orders of magnitude better on every axis including price, capacity, size, and performance. But solid-state providers say it's time they moved over to make way for modern storage. Hard drives have been in a slump, but a new technique promises to double th ..read more

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we break down the fundamentals of quantum computing - the different approaches out there, the challenges to bringing it into a widespread commercial reality, and the potential use cases that quantum may help with. To help divulge this, we speak to QuEra's Yuval Boger who shares a little about the company's experience with the technology, including how we can go about deploying quantum computers inside data centers ..read more

25 years ago, the first content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged, to solve a specific problem - how to make web pages load faster. More than two decades later, 72 percent of Internet content is delivered through CDNs. But the companies involved are still almost invisible - until something goes wrong. In 2021, in a series of outages, large numbers of unrelated websites all went out of action at the same time. It turned out that these sites had all come to rely on the same CDNs, effectively installing a single point of failure for large sections of the Internet.  Since t ..read more

Europe has an Energy Efficiency Directive, Germany has an Energy Efficiency Act, and operators there can be fined for inefficiency. Meanwhile, Amsterdam has declared war on sleeping servers, and set limits on where facilities can be built. Across Europe, in response to congested electric grids and shortages of land, local governments are stepping in to regulate data centers. Sometimes they want them to be greener, sometimes they want them to be quieter, and sometimes they just want them somewhere else. But any data center operator now has to be prepared to meet new reporting&nbs ..read more

Europe has an Energy Efficiency Directive, Germany has an Energy Efficiency Act, and operators there can be fined for inefficiency. Meanwhile, Amsterdam has declared war on sleeping servers, and set limits on where facilities can be built. Across Europe, in response to congested electric grids and shortages of land, local governments are stepping in to regulate data centers. Sometimes they want them to be greener, sometimes they want them to be quieter, and sometimes they just want them somewhere else. But any data center operator now has to be prepared to meet new reporting&nbs ..read more

At the start of 2023, Yuval Bachar told us about his latest project - to build off-grid, hydrogen-powered data centers. As 2023 came to an end, he was back to tell us he'd done it. He's got 1MW of capacity fed by hydrogen in Mountain View California, and he's telling potential customers he can build the same thing anywhere you can get hydrogen shipped by pipe or tanker.  He's keen on the benefits. No long waits for power distribution, no struggles getting permits for diesel. And the building is quick and cheap too. He can make them with a 3D concrete printer - which incidentally is e ..read more