I just spent the week at DatacenterDynamics Webscale in San Jose and had many, many conversations with lots of laughs. It's now Saturday morning and at 4:30a I started to think about what the future of data centers will look like. Many of the conversations came together.
Some announcements came this week can be used to show the changes that are coming. One is Google's post on Deepmind with Jim Gao.
“ Major breakthroughs, however, are few and far between — which is why we are excited to share that by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to our own Google data centers, we’ve managed to reduce the amount of energy we use for cooling by up to 40 percent. In any large scale energy-consuming environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.
”
Another is Coolan being acquired by Salesforce.
“Coolan, was founded by Amir Michael, formerly a hardware engineer at Google GOOG 0.56% and Facebook FB 0.32% , two companies that know quite a bit about deploying massive amounts of computing hardware. Coolan, which has ten employees, has scored an unknown amount of venture funding from North Bridge Venture Capital and Social Capital.
Michael’s work at Facebook contributed to the launch of the Open Compute Project, an effort to make the design specifications for efficient and powerful data center hardware available to anyone.”
I have had the pleasure of having awesome conversations with Jim and Amir where we can all geek out on challenges in the data center. Since none of these conversations were with intent of writing a blog post, there are details I can't share and quite frankly I can't remember the details. :-) But the high level concepts stick around in long term memory and repeat.
So what is the future of data centers? It is people like Jim, Amir, and a few others who see the changes that could be made. How data is the basis for insight and discovery. Amir writes in a blog post.
“These last few years have been some of the most fulfilling of my career. Together with my brother and co-founder Yoni, we successfully launched a company that brought transparency to hardware operations. We hired a talented team of engineers who developed tools that empower our customers to track and analyze infrastructure reliability for increased uptime and optimized efficiency.
Building a startup is an awesome journey, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done. Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world. ”
If you want to know what the future data centers is going to look like you need to talk to people like Jim Gao, Amir Michael, and others who have a passion to make changes with data and transparency in operations.