Wednesday, May 12, 2010 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
An around‐the‐clock solar powered model is presented for a global data center (DC) grid architecture. An illustrative example studied involves a grid of 5 fiber‐optical network connected zeroemission DCs: 4 solar‐powered DCs at 24/4 = 6 hour of time zone difference apart (e.g. Europe/Africa, Americas, Asia‐Pac, Middle‐East), and 1 always‐on (e.g. wind and/or geothermal powered, electric grid connected) back‐up DC. Network connectivity and DC access is provided at all time zones continuously, while only two of the DCs need to be powered‐on at any time.
During the local business hours at any given time zone, with both peak DC load and peak sunlight, the closest DC will be powered on for lowest network latencies. With the use of an innovative self‐optimizing ‘Adaptive‐Mesh’ optical grid network, the network capacity needed for inter‐DC data and process transfers enabling the ratio of 5:2 savings in electric power demand (and avoidance of green house gas emissions, as the primary active and backup DCs are solar and e.g. geothermal powered) is achieved without increasing the IT/networking costs. To provide the required network connectivity for this DC grid example, i.e., 1:1 protected, nonoversubscribed full mesh connectivity among the 5 DC sites, each with doubled 10Gbps interface to exchange data with the other DCs, for a total of 2x5x2 = 20 10Gbps access points, would require 20 optical wavelength loop resources on the global fiber ring when using conventional network technologies. However, as can be demonstrated alongside the presentation, with the novel Adaptive‐Mesh network, the same inter‐DC throughputs can be achieved with just a single wavelengths resource, providing architectural 20X scalability and network bandwidth cost efficiency improvement, while further eliminating need for the doubled 200Gbps I/O capacity core router/switch nodes that would be required with a conventional non‐adaptive network.
The Adaptive‐Mesh architecture based DC grid thus considerably reduces the materials and electric power needed for the network, while, through to its in the order of 20:1 networking cost reduction, making the zero‐emission, high‐performance grid economically viable. The presented continuously solar powered global data center grid model is expected to be in particular applicable for the large ‘cloud’ IT services providers, global ASPs, online media and content distribution companies etc. data intensive enterprises with worldwide operations."