Is this the future of Data Centers?
what we have here is an emersion cooling situation where we have a Cisco C220 uh UCS server and it's operating at 100% utilization of those CPUs now one of the interesting things we have here if I could show this screen um is we have 100% utilization of those CPUs and you can look at these operating temperatures of here well below uh ADC typically you see 80 to 90c. Hey everyone it's David Bombal coming to you from Cisco live with a very special guest Denise welcome. Thanks wonderful to be here. Denise I got a surprise for you so if you can turn that page over or that paper over this is an article from the BBC talking about how the UK wants to become a leader in AI but which seems really surprising they may not have enough water in the UK to power the AI data centers I hear there's a real problem AI is taking off data data centers are getting built like mad yeah but power electricity if you like uh water or problems how are we going to solve this or has Cisco got a solution or you know where are we going? Well I feel like this is the quiz first of all and second of all uh we're going to nail it because those are two things that are near and dear you know we we've been at this now with engineering sustainability office as sort of a a formal function for about three years and the premise has always been to integrate systems um so that we can unlock more power efficiency Energy Efficiency um the water shortage is is something a little bit newer because depending on the technology that's you know in to cool data centers and what what AI has simply done is put a spotlight on the issues that we've known for so long and so we have been at this um we've been at this for a while and I think there are very few companies who are well positioned to bring all of these different systems of systems together and then create an ecosystem that actually is efficient and sustainable and now there's pressure before without the urgency or pressure it's hard to make the case right for anything to change or move how often are you completely redesigning a Data Center and and yet um what do they say they say uh necessity is the mother of all invention yeah so here we are. Yeah it seems I mean I just reading reading some articles from the IDC it says here that Europe needs to spend like a trillion to power AI so I mean there's it seems like AI is going like this data center builds are going like this yep we haven't got the power we haven't got the water so how is sustainability helping this is is it making the devices more efficient are you doing some clever stuff or what's happening? So let me let me walk you through um you know where to start where customers what customers are facing with today and then I'll tell you a little bit a peak in the future of what's coming and art are possible okay so first and foremost like the principles of networking you can't fix what you can't see so everything is about visibility so we have spent the last you know handful of years specifically unlocking standardization in energy management um we've actually simplified it down to five key metrics for energy measurement and we've built that into the Telemetry across our entire end to-end portfolio at the moment we have 13 controllers right Cisco is always on this mission to simplify so so as we build towards Northstar I'm sure that will get you know the number will go down not up but at the moment we are in the process of rolling out we have four of the 13 on the process of rolling out the rest and those five Key Energy metrics how much energy are you using what's the cost of that energy what's the greenhouse gas footprint of that energy um there's something called uh carbon intensity and there's something called Energy Mix these five metrics are now available through Cisco's Telemetry built into the dashboards part of existing licenses right so we're not char for visibility all customers have this the only two parties that have access to that information is Cisco and the customer so all the services that are coming and there are many services right are starting to build practices around let us help you capture this information in an intelligent way so once you have visibility you can you can start to do insights and analytics off of that um you know and we had a little tiny little acquisition called Splunk not too long ago just a small one just a small one where data data is king and queen right so once you have that those insights and those analytics just imagine what you can do with automation so that's the foundation set the foundation with energy management well now that you can you can measure energy you can peek inside of data centers and say whoa why are we spending half of the energy bill on cooling uh look at the water water usage so to go back to this right shortage of water um so now now we have the those insights so then we think about okay well what can you do with the existing equipment you know like you would and maybe a home or a building you know you're turning off light switches everywhere you possibly can when they're not in use well that's great that's incrementally going to help maybe a couple points here and there that's not going to get you leap frog Innovation to get ready for AI yeah and so what you need is new technology right new innovation in new um new designs that completely break the mo mold and and completely break those silos uh have you heard of a new technology uh in electricity uh a new breakthrough called Class 4 Fault Manage power. I haven't you got to tell us about it so I carry these cables around um and I
would say nine times out of 10 someone's half expecting me to pull out you know chopstick or lipstick from this little bag but you know 20, 25 years ago when we we pulled out power over Ethernet and said this is going to replace all the telephone lines I'm sure there were a lot of people that were laughing. I remember those days enough to remember. So imagine putting voice and power over the same line on this night you know power over ethernet cable and then saying we're going to power all the APs and and cameras with this there were a lot of people who were very skeptical fast forward we now have entire ecosystems in in the built environment that are being powered with PoE the problem with PoE is it tops out at 90 Watts about 100 Watts from a physics standpoint class 4 Power over Ethernet you just can't go any further um about eight years ago one of the heads of engineering went back to our Cisco fellows and and and some of that community and said hey what comes after this um and a and a Cisco felt by the name of Joel Gorgan started working on what comes next as of 2023 in the National electrical code there is a new class of power for the first time in 45 years oh W okay so back when if you know definitely not old enough for the current Wars but you know back when when Tesla and and Edison were fighting over AC and DC power you know who was a clear winner where there isn't quite a clear winner we know DC is is far more efficient but are you playing with you know high voltage DC power at home I hope not right yep uh so Class 4 Fault Managed Power is up to 450 volt DC and it is safe to touch just like power over ethernet it has class two cabling practices so it has the same cabling practices so if you allowed to Cable power PoE you would be able to power fault manage power. oh so like sorry to interrupt your network engineer could do the cabling rather than electrician? Correct correct and so power power over for you know that final mile well now we have something for the backbone and to tie that back to data center like why is that so important imagine being able to remove copper Buss imagine being able to remove all of that cabling that heavy thick cabling you see you know in the tops of racks of data centers imagine bringing that down and powering it with a new type of cable that can do direct so all of the conversions that you go AC to DC think about how many times you're you're you're going through psus to get you useful power inside of a box it's at least three or four times so just that energy conversion savings is tremendous so we start adding up between new new technologies that are starting to come a little bit more accessible to mass market like immersion cooling direct to chip as a transition all of these things are starting to break the molds do you have any idea today what the average density of a data center rack is? You got to tell us. So today in most customers I talk to and the data supports this it's around
10 kilowatts a rack when you start looking at inference training for AI or you start even doing training models for AI those numbers are going well over 100 kilowatt of rack all the way into two 200 plus we're even seeing some for the hyperscalers that are in the 300s wow the density per rack it we don't have a space problem right we have a power and a cooling problem yeah again with new technology well how are you going to power that rack how are you going to make sure that rack doesn't burn up both from a safety standpoint for the electricity but also from a cooling perspective the chips are running so hot uh physics will necessitate that it chips can no longer be air cooled so whether you're doing direct to chip or you're you're fully immersing a tank and for the first time uh in our Cisco live uh history here in Amsterdam we have two immersion tanks on the floor so you can physically see seeing is believing what it looks like you know to dunk a server to have fully fully immersible Optics um it's pretty wild to see in a lab what it what it takes to configure these boxes it's not hard it's not that much actually we're not we're not manufacturing brand new things only for immersion at least not today maybe in the future we will but you're removing fans you're removing heat sinks you're recovering just a couple of things and then you know with with the right uh sticky hands because you know dunking it in mineral oil can be a little slippery you just drop it right in the tank and so when you think about powering a Data Center and then cooling a data center adding new technologies on top of that ability to see what you're doing and measure from that baseline of energy management um is how we start to bring all these systems together. So I mean immersion you're taking the the servers the switches everything and just dunking them directly in in this liquid right? That is the future. But it's not water right cuz I think a lot of people watching will know like water cooled PCs and stuff like that this is how's this different? yeah so for all the gamers out there you're not afraid of putting some liquid near your equipment but no this is not it um we use mineral oil so it look it has the viscous almost like a baby oil and we can show you what that looks like um that's what we're using in the immersion tanks um interestingly enough actually the the meantime failure rate goes way up because you're not introducing dust and particles from all the fans from so for from an air perspective uh that that's quite interesting there's no condensation or evaporation so that's another you know plus for you know the the maintenance of these things um they're not you know they're not quite as mass market today as as one would think but what's actually fascinating is I've seen customers start to bring in these tanks um bit by bit so you can use you know a row and start transitioning that to immersion you can use another row and start doing you know hotspot addressing with rear door heat exchangers and cdus or or you know units at the end of you know crack units at the end of a row and so you can have a mixed environment Data Center and start testing these things and provided you have the right Baseline well now you're in business right now you can choose the architectures that are more sustainable that aren't going to be as much of a drag on your resources so to your point about you know the water shortages um and the concerns about data center rebuilds in in the UK well imagine if you no longer are needing that water air chillers on the top and and having all that condensation. So there's no fans right so you said you take the fans out of the service because it's in the liquid so does the liquid get cooled by somehow to keep the devices cool. Well if you think about uh how much you know water will boil there's a boiling
point for water Minal oil that that boiling point is is is so much higher so it's liquid to air so the the air the heat that's coming off of that that mineral oil is not anything close to what you would have with with like Peg water or other solutions that are more that are water-based but it's it's fascinating the number of PhD chemists um that I've seen in some of these liquid lab uh re you know R&D centers it's it's fascinating to watch all of these multi-disciplines come together um to solve these problems. And you're solving the problem of noise right cuz notoriously noisy. That's right so today you walk into Data Centers they are noisy they are cold or hot depending on what aisle you might be in they're quite dangerous because you see all of these signage that say danger high voltage don't touch so imagine if fall that goes away right with fault manage power it's not dangerous anymore without the fans it's not noisy and with with immersion or directed chip or some form of liquid or immersion cooling now it's not cold because you won't need to run the the HVAC systems um you know to the hill all the time. Denise I see we've moved locations we're in the Sustainability Zone I believe and you've got some cool technology to show us. Absolutely you know we often say seeing is believing the technology in this Sustainability Zone brings it to life and shows how customers are using this today to make it real uh we've got 15 different demos across and we're really excited to show you uh a couple of them um let me introduce my good friend Jeff here Jeff has been around the world with us in this Pico tank and we're going to show you we were talking about earlier the two different types of liquid cooling we're going to show you immersion right um simply because it's a little bit it's a little bit less known um and and again when you see it it just blows your mind on how um how Energy Efficiency can look and feel so Jeff can you walk us through what's behind us here? Thank you Denise um what we have here is an emerging cooling situation where we have a Cisco C220 uh UCS server and it's operating at 100% utilization of those CPUs now one of the interesting things we have here if I could show this screen um is we have 100% utilization of those CPUs and you can look at these operating temperatures of here well below uh 80c typically you see 80 to 90c uh would be an operating temperature that means you're going to get equipment uh reliability better reliability and better performance of your of your system as it operates as you take a look at what we have here one of the first things you'll notice is that we have no fans we deactivate the fans right off the bat you save 11% of the energy of this system by having that this unit standalone we're providing liquid to air cooling. And let's talk about the fluid because I think a lot of times people think it's water inside there what are we actually looking at for the fluid? yeah water is conductive that's the problem there so what we have is Shell S3 X uh fluid it's a um synthetic oil uh that is optimized for heat transfer coming from Shell. Right right and again going back to the energy typically with air cooled these units would be running 80 to 90 seat that's correct I'm looking at the numbers here they're well below well below 80 mostly like actually below 7 like around 70 and below. Yeah you'll
see 66 to 72 which is extremely low operating temperatures which means the equipment is going to last longer and it's going to perform better day to day. This whole concept of you know asset longevity when you're removing fans and removing the concept of dust and air and sand getting in those systems is also pretty pretty incredible. That's right. You should see in a white space uh clean environment an edge this would be an example of an edge application but when you're in the fluid you're protecting the equipment from all the contaminants. So David he said edge and I could talk um get very excited about Edge Computing and what this opens up but that might be something for a different day. You mentioned Edge what is that? So Edge Computing meaning you're not in a huge data center you can do more of the compute closer and closer to the end points and the where the the user are. Yeah cuz I was going to ask you sorry the we were talking about data centers mainly is this technology only for data centers or is it going to be like for Enterprises other businesses? So this technology can be anywhere right and Every industry uh you know we can be in a desert we can be in a jungle uh we can be in a wiring closet we can be in the white space and for every industry.
On a cruise ship oh well Hospital like again art of possible moving this anywhere and away from data centers and starting to distribute not only the power but the compute gets super interesting and from a campus environment we're starting to see more and more bleeding together between data center campus with AI and and where you need the compute I actually I'm starting to see more pendulum swing back for on from data center so to speak um we were we were in the lab I think we're allowed to talk about this we were in the lab and playing around we actually took a catalyst switch reconfigured it this gentleman over here did it himself in less than an hour and again again removing the fans and removing the heat sinks you can do the same thing and have a server a switch and completely the only industry's completely immersible optics in one tank. Wow I mean I love that because that solves this problem that I kind of highlighted because if we use the current technology I mean they're talking about building nine nuclear reactors or something in the UK that's right and Microsoft brought a mothball nuclear power station online I believe just to try and power these things. Absolutely well and this is the other thing to consider most of renewable energy is DC native today 380 volt DC so with fault managed power we are already tapping into 380 volt DC ecosystems that exist with PoE when it first came out the ecosystems didn't quite exist one of the things that we're also doing is we have this engineering alliances kind of program so to speak we we're we're leveraging existing things that we have at Cisco but we're doing engineering validation on vendors that are coming into the ecosystem so we can provide our customers with a full solution so imagine coming to Cisco and say Hey I want to retrofit a building right I want to make it as smart and energy efficient as possible well instead of that customer needing to figure out well what lights should I use what blinds should I use how do I get solar in there imagine being able to come and say hey I need the network to work and I'd like the network to automate all of these different things today a a normal building has over 30 different building management systems imagine having that number down to less than five that convergence of it and OT is absolutely starting to happen and so PoE enabled everything from signage monitors blinds lights you know furniture and desks that are energized all of these things can be completely DC all the way and renewable energy is DC native so imagine being able to do that full DC micro grid all the way again fault managed power in the backbone and then PoE for that last mile these are things that are that exist today have we fully connected every last ecosystem is it available to mass Market no not yet but that's where that art of possible is is here today what we're doing in Labs how we're validating this so that we can offer these things um you know at speed and scale eventually. I'm a bit slow right so we've got PoE ethernet cables and then we've got traditional power so what's this new technology called again? It's called Class 4 Fault Manage Power FMP is that going to replace the power cables and the PoE cables or is that just the power cables just the power cable so you still have your ethernet cable and then you have a replacement power cable. yep so anything that uses up to 100 Watts PoE is going to be your your go-to so APs cameras sensors no problem phones you'll still use you'll still use a PoE cable anything that requires much higher voltage you know say over 300 watts this is where where Fault Managed Power will start to replace um power supplies now what's exciting about today's show and on the floor is one of the partners that we've recently brought into the engineering Alliance program is Panduit right and Panduit is is a known known entity a known name and so one of the first things we're doing and we we can show you this in the demo is up to 50 56 volt DC is available today it's powering our switch and our switch is powering all of the endpoints on the in the smart building demo right so that is available at Mass scale today what's next is 380 volt DC uh fault manage power. FMP is that something new has
this been around for a while? Well I mentioned it was it was listed in the National electrical code in 2023 yep right so that is when it went I would say kind of more fully public um in terms of you know Cisco and and when Cisco is going to going to announce it on our own personal road map we're not we're not quite there yet we're hoping that it's it's soon but that's why we're partnering with broader ecosystems there's something called an FMP Alliance where Cisco um has a president seat we have the leading number of patents in Fault Managed Power with d for data and cable on the same line and so with VA with this ecosystem it's not a oneperson game right energy is everyone and that's why I I I would really encourage this is about everyone having a seat at the table eventually to standardize this because that's when we win if somebody said I can offer you a better faster safer way to do power why would any one companies keep that to themselves right it's like the seat belt everybody needs it so that's the that's really the goal of of the FMP Alliance is to bring education and awareness but it is new um and I'd like to believe that it's revolutionary and and that's what FMP Alliance is all about is bringing those companies who are on the forefront of pioneering and evangelizing and bringing that education and awareness but there's it's going to take it's going to take a lot of time it's going to take all of us um and it's it's great this platform is awesome because for those who are who are just deciding you know what path to take and what what interest areas um are really going to take off you know energy and power is is a fascinating space and there is a global World shortage of skilled labor in the space. Denise you were telling me I believe that buildings consume a huge amount of electricity in today's world? yeah depending on what study it's 30 to 40% of the world's electricity goes to buildings and inside of buildings there are over 30 different building management systems that often have to operate all these various networks um but Liz is here to tell us how we can automate that and make it a little simpler. Thank you very much first of all as Miss Denise said one of the biggest problems we have in buildings is the share quantity of separate networks duplication and the inability for things to talk to each other but with a modern Cisco Network that has proper Security on we can combine all those networks together which means they can start to work together so the first thing we can look at is the power distribution as well so on this stand here we've got a uh Cisco switch here this is providing 90 watts per port which means we're able to power pretty much everything you see here such monitors up and down desks lighting so we can now get to the point where most things we in within the main office environment we can power from our switch and uh Andrew will talk to you a little bit about what we do with the rest of it but um before we do that one of the other advantages we've got here is we've now got a significant quantity of data and data by itself is not much use but when you start to actually get some analytics tools on that data you can really understand how you're using energy when you're using energy when you shouldn't be using energy and back to the building point how do I actually need all this building space in the first place. Liz as I understand that some of the studies that we've seen from some of these earlier builds are saving upwards of what percent can we see from um you know a monthly savings. Just from you know lighting and and that kind of thing um you know on its own probably about 35% just depend where you are in the building and the type of um infrastructure you've got already but yes it can be that it can be that high thank you. um and Andrew's got the cables that I often carry around in my bag um Andrew can you talk to us a little bit about what what you're holding. Sure so I'm
holding in my hand two cables this one is the PoE category cable right this carries about 90 watt 100 uh 1 gabit of data this on the other hand is a FMP cable you can see it's twisted pair there's eight pairs in here each pair carries about 600 watt so in my hand this is a 5 kilowatt cable. And tell us about the distance the efficiency and the safety of that cable. PoE we we actually Cisco started with PoE right this is again 100 watt 100 meters right back I think 2017 we started thinking about what goes beyond PoE because 100 watt that's the end of this envelope so we have been working with on the United States side the um NEC National Electrical Code to introduce a new class of power and this can do up to 450 volt uh 2 kilomet Unlimited wattage unlimited wattage did you hear that David wow and this in terms of skill sets requirement cabling it's all lowb requirements so uh you actually don't have to have really a lot of training like I think in us it's about 3,000 hours of training to actually get certified as electrician you actually just this is normal technology labor force can actually deploy this. So fun fact in shameless plug we just produced uh our very first Cisco FMP white paper and we will share that available to the audience because there's a lot to dig into there this is a quick uh commercial brief on it um and aliser can you tell us where are customers using all this and what are they seeing? So uh customers are coming to me on a daily basis and saying uh where can I where where can I depl this and what I'm finding is most are seeing lighting as one of the easy easy ins yeah and proof of concept is very simple to do uh the other thing is uh as Liz was saying about gathering data the office environment what's actually happening in that office environment and then making business decisions based on the insights that the infrastructure can give I think uh the exciting thing about this from a sustainability point of view is if you moved uh your lighting to PoE you only have have one cable run rather than two cable runs and the amount of plastic Precious Minerals that you're saving and that sort of deployment uh can be ignored. yeah so as you can see this is very much a business
driven decision to save money save costs and oh by the way you're doing something pretty good for the environment. yeah I mean it's amazing the amount of money that's being has to be invested to try and solve this problem like you said AI just put a spotlight on it it seems so there's a lot of opportunities for people who are like young or perhaps not sure what they want to do right or or people doing a career pivot yeah right absolutely. You mentioned direct to chip what is that? yeah so when you think about liquid cooling inside of a data center there's really two main types there's what's called direct to chip where you'll have a cooling distribution unit sitting either in Rack or at the end of a rack feeding a you know cold or chilled water directly to a cold plate behind the chip on the board and then there's different there are different types there's single phase double phase there's closed loop open loop there so there's a lot of different types but direct to chip means there's chilled water going directly to a chip and then some closed or open loop that's removing the heat from the chip and then expelling the heat somewhere else whether they're you know fans on the on the on the you know chillers off the roof or um you know at the back of a building the other type is immersion and immersion cooling some some will say is or is not liquid but immersion cooling is different and in immersion cooling you're usually using some sort of mineral oil. So Denise Cisco have been doing sustainability for a long time and I believe I don't know the the exact figure is it 99% or something of Cisco devices are recycled is that right? yeah so let me let me dig in because this is something I feel like we should be singing from the rooftops when we think about Cisco has been working and it's just ingrained in who we are right so from a ratings and Rings perspective there are things like the climate disclosure project CDP we just got another year of a rating um there's a number of ratings and rankings out there Eco arst gr um science-based Target initiatives where Cisco continues and continuously has top marks why is that important it's important because it's reflective of things like our supply chain our takeback the products that we're putting out and how efficient they are and so with our supply chain sometimes we get one or number one or number two by Gardner each year and our supply chain leadership has been working at this for decades like we talked about Cisco being 40 years old well direct relationships with every single component supplier doesn't happen overnight right it's something they've been hard at work at and what's amazing about this is it allows us we have 100% takeback program which means any customer anywhere in the world we will take back our product for free so we pay for the shipping and handling and we'll come pick it up and then 99.98% of that product can be responsibly recycled remanufactured or reused and we have this incredible demo where we're physically taking a part and showing how modular the build and design is so circular design principles are built into every one of our new product design we actually have patents and IP on how we we deconstruct and recycle and reuse some of our equipment. Denise where are things going I mean it's hard to predict the future but where do you sort of see us heading? So I think there's a couple of of constants which I think is so exciting about now we just need to apply more more urgency some of the contents are power and energy we have to figure out we have to figure out better ways there's so much wasted energy inside of our buildings inside of our data center inside of all of our Energy Systems that's one two we need to start bringing more and more of these ecosystems together and when we when we start doing that we see more and more optimization happening across the board and I think that is the that is the critical aspect of bringing together new development at speed and scale into these ecosystems and validating that from an engineering perspective and being able to kind of curate which which systems need to work together for the most efficiency or for you know the best outcome I think the the world needs not not just these incremental changes but big leap frog frog changes for what the next kind of big transformation or revolution is going to be to support these new models um and so it's I think it's that fresh thinking you know don't try to do bit by bit let's look at completely new designs and go at it at once. Denise dodgy question preps a lot of young people want to save the
environment and are very environmentally focused but unfortunately a lot of the older generation preps aren't and um a lot of business people might say you know where's the ROI on this is this just about trying to save the environment or is there a business savings to doing this kind of stuff? I'm actually really glad you asked that question and there's two aspects to that first and foremost if this was not a business viable opportunity I would not be talking about it not because I don't care about the world but because I do a lot of give back to my community and Save in my off hours work time I think this is a tremendous business opportunity and that is further substantiated there's a ratings and ranking out there called the global corporate nights they look at the top 100 sustainability companies of the world and do an index for the past 10 years those 100 companies have outperformed every major indic in the world and so as younger people are making their decisions and voting with their feet where they're going to go work and what how their purpose and their work drives them this is where the second part of the the your question we need all the generations in the workforce today and there are four key Generations that are still in the workforce and they will be for a little bit couple a couple more years we need all these generations to work together because those coming in who just want to save the environment and those leaving who know what how those things were built and why they're so en energy inefficient they all need to work together to solve these problems I've actually had the pleasure of working with with people who are maybe in the last handful of years of their of their work um career saying before I leave I want to fix the problem that we all created and the only way we're going to do that if is if they can transition some of that knowledge into the younger generation. I love that thanks so much Denise for sharing I wish we could have more time. Yes wonderful to be here thanks.
2025-03-07 04:53
