In addition to providing computing, data storage and AI services, the new data center will the the World’s Largest District Heat Recovery Scheme. Excess heat produced by the datacenter servers will be captured and routed into the local district heating network serving Espoo, Kirkkonummi, and Kauniainen. The system is set to cover 40% of the annual heating needs for roughly 250,000 households. Reusing this heat is projected to eliminate 400,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually by displacing fossil fuel usage because the power for data center is sourced entirely from renewable energy.

Construction at Hepokorpi has progressed steadily through phases of ground preparation, rock excavation, and steel frame erection, and some of the first building are already built.

The data center needs a lots of power. While Microsoft does not publicly disclose precise, operational server power capacity figures for individual datacenter halls, official environmental impact assessments and project plans provide clear technical estimates: Estimated Electrical Capacity (IT & Infrastructure Load): Up to ~100 MW (with environmental impact assessments for the broader site evaluating total capacity scales around 100 MW to 200 MW across various expansion phases). For this reason the data center seems to be connected to a big new transformer connected to 400 kV power line. That would mean up to almost 300A current taken from 400 kV three phase power line.

It looks the voltage is dropped to 110 kV level that is then sent to the data center buildings, although. Fingrid’s newly built main Hepokorpi primary transmission substation actually steps down the 400 kV grid power to 110 kV using compact Gas-Insulated Switchgear (GIS) technology. From there, regional sub-transmission lines and Caruna’s local distribution network route that 110 kV into Microsoft’s on-site transformers. On-site step-down transformers convert 110 kV to 20 kV (a standard medium-voltage level used in Nordic industrial facilities and distribution networks) that is most probably routed around the campus with medium voltage cables.

There it would be dropped with another transformer to the voltage level used by the data center computers. While Microsoft keeps precise proprietary server supply specs confidential, these follow standard OCP / Open Compute Project hyperscale architectures): Dry-type transformers step the 20 kV down to 400 V 3-phase AC line-to-line (230 V AC line-to-neutral). This feeds the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units and Power Distribution Units (PDUs). In Europe typical primary operational voltage feeding the rack server power supplies is 400 V / 230 V AC (3-phase 400 V AC input, delivering 230 V AC per phase). Server rack Power Supply Units (PSUs) convert 230/400 V AC directly down to 48 V DC distributed along the rack busbars. Modern high-density AI nodes (e.g., NVIDIA MGX/DGX racks used in Microsoft Azure AI clusters) rely on 48 V DC (lower losses than legacy 12V systems).

Microsoft’s Finland data-center project demonstrates how computing infrastructure can become part of a city’s heating system. Microsoft says waste heat (roughly 100 MW to 175 MW) from its Finnish data centers will eventually provide heat for around 250,000 people through district heating networks serving Espoo, Kauniainen and Kirkkonummi. The system uses heat pumps to raise the temperature of heat recovered from the data-center cooling system before it is transferred into the municipal heating network. I suspect that this building to be part of the heat pump system.

The recovery system requires infrastructure and energy — but that waste heat which would otherwise be rejected can be put to productive use. This approach could become increasingly valuable in colder regions where district heating is already widespread. Microsoft says the system is scheduled to begin operations in 2027. Combined with Microsoft’s sister facility in Kirkkonummi (Kolabacken), the joint campus footprint accounts for up to 350 MW of total thermal heat recovery for Fortum’s regional district heating grid.

The money will be used to develop data centres as well as supporting infrastructure, and represents the search engine giant’s largest single investment in Europe to date. “This is Google’s largest single investment in Europe and a testament to Finland’s leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure,” the company said on Wednesday.

The AI infrastructure build-out would involve the development of three new data centres in the country’s north. The locations were selected based on the availability of electrical power and cold climate (temperature ​can drop well below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter). After investment Google has operations spanning Hamina (current data center site), Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala.

The investments will include data centres, electricity grid improvements and clean energy and battery projects driving services such as Gemini, Search, Maps and YouTube, Google ​said in a statement. The investment is expected to ⁠contribute some €3.6 billion to Finland’s gross domestic product during the construction phase. The Google investment is expected to support more than 37,000 jobs during construction and boost Finland’s GDP by €3.6bn a year, according to Google. Construction is set to take place in 2027 and 2028.

Illustration made with Google Gemini AI:

There is a question how this will affect the price of the electrical power. Some see this is a right time to plan to build a new nuclear power plant. Building new nuclear facilities typically involves enormous upfront costs, long construction times, and market uncertainty over long horizons. Alongside facility expansion, Google is partnering with local energy companies (including Fortum) to secure power supplies, develop new generation capacity, and support long-term grid stability and decarbonization in Finland. Google has signed a 22-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Fortum. This long-term commitment supports the lifetime extension of the Loviisa nuclear power plant. While Google is also backing onshore wind power (629 MW) and grid-balancing battery storage (a 94 MW system in Kajaani), data centers require steady baseload power even in cold weather without wind. Nuclear power fills this critical need for predictable, zero-emission electricity.

Sources:

Bloomberg: Google to Invest €13 Billion in AI Infrastructure in Finland
YLE: Google to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure and buy nuclear power in Finland
Google: Google Deepens Commitment to Finland with Two-Year €13 Billion investment in AI Infrastructure
Kauppalehti: Kommentti / Fortumin megadiilistä heräsi heti huoli sähkön hinnasta
ETN: Googlen jätti-investointi: aika on kypsä uudelle ydinvoimalle
Uusiteknologia: Google rakentaa Suomeen 13 miljardilla eurolla uusia datakeskuksia
Reuters: Google to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure and buy nuclear power in Finland
BBC: Google picks Finland for its largest single investment in Europe

But how does it look inside a data center? Here are some data center tour videos to watch.

Over 200,000 Servers in One Place! Visiting Hetzner in Falkenstein (Germany)

Microsoft reveals its MASSIVE data center (Full Tour)

Inside Amazon’s Massive Data Center

Facebook’s largest Data Center you never seen

Inside Google’s $13 Billion Data Centers

Links to more videos:

Facebook Data Center – Fort Worth

What is a Data Center?

Inside a Google data center

Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep

Inside The World’s Largest Data Center

A Fun Data Center Tour at PhoenixNAP

A DAY in the LIFE of the DATA CENTRE | NETWORK TOUR with ASH & JAMES!

A DAY in the LIFE of the DATA CENTRE | FULL CUSTOMER “RACK & STACK” with ASH & JAMES!

Read more:
Cloud Computing’s Coming Energy Crisis
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/cloud-computings-coming-energy-crisis

Just fee days ago Cloudflare was down. And also Google has taken a bite?

Is it an outage season in US that affects peole all over world?

Who broke all the social networks? So far there have been reports out that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are having problems.

Yes it looks like cloud service and CDN summer vacation period has started. Earlier this week this July trend was started with Cloudflare and Google cloud. And there are more problem reports:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/02/major-internet-outage-affects-discord-verizon-and-even-down-detector/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-down-not-working-picture-voice-messages-photo-video-download-failed-a8986406.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48841815

Akamai posted an article about rarely seen vector attack that’s been seen in the last few weeks https://blogs.akamai.com/sitr/2019/07/anatomy-of-a-syn-ack-attack.html?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social_DS&utm_campaign=social_dynamic_signal

Analysis of an attack is not sign of a network impact

“Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over. Impacted all services. No evidence yet attack related”

A Cloudflare outage was impacting sites everywhere

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/a-cloudflare-outage-is-impacting-sites-everywhere/

They said they shut down the “service” responsible. I think bug is the most likely cause here.

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1146065231270907907?s=21

Cloudflare: Down for 30 mins

Google Cloud (us-east1): had been earlier down for hours https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19016

#CloudComputing

The cloud, i mean someone else’s servers is having issues.

Does this has something to do with this?

Americans Will Go On Vacation This Week

http://on.forbes.com/6184EsatG

The Arduino IoT Cloud is an easy-to-use platform that makes it very simple for anyone to develop and manage their IoT applications, then deploy them to a large number of users.

With the launch of the Arduino IoT Cloud, Arduino now provides its one million users a complete end-to-end approach to IoT that includes hardware, firmware, cloud services, and knowledge.
The Arduino IoT Cloud also provides other methods of interaction, including HTTP REST API, MQTT, Command-Line Tools, Javascript, and Websockets.

Many LoRaWAN sensors, one Arduino IoT Cloud – Luca Cipriani (Arduino) – The Things Conference 2019

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=co3UmVTz0SQ

2019 will be the year that multi-cloud strategies grow up according to this article. I can pretty much agree on also the other trends listed on this article.

Why Kubernetes is The New Application Server article tells that the greatest things about containers is that you can deploy everything (for example, a Linux distribution, the JVM, the application server, libraries, configurations and, finally, your application) inside a pre-built container. Plus, executing a single container that has everything built in is incredibly easier than moving your code to a production environment. Before containers became very popular, several NFR (non-functional requirements) such as security, isolation, fault tolerance, configuration management, and others were provided by application servers. Kubernetes platform provides a great foundation for other projects such as Red Hat OpenShift, Istio, and Apache OpenWhisk.

Kubernetes Services By Example article is an introduction to concept of services in Kubernetes. In a nutshell, Kubernetes services are an abstraction for pods, providing a stable, virtual IP (VIP) address. Keeping the mapping between the VIP and the pods up-to-date is the job of kube-proxy.

What is OpenStack? article gives an introduction to related technology called OpenStack. OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private cloud. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit that oversees both development and community-building around the project. OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances (like containers) that handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the fly. It promises to make horizontal scaling easy.

]]> https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2018/11/07/is-kubernetes-the-new-application-server/feed/ 25 https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2018/07/24/google-cloud-goes-all-in-on-hybrid-with-its-new-cloud-services-platform-techcrunch/ https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2018/07/24/google-cloud-goes-all-in-on-hybrid-with-its-new-cloud-services-platform-techcrunch/#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2018 17:52:10 +0000 http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/?p=178794 https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/24/google-cloud-goes-all-in-on-hybrid-with-its-new-cloud-services-platform/ The cloud isn’t right for every business. Be that because of latency constraints at the edge, regulatory requirements or because sometimes own data center is cheaper. So the vast majority of enterprises today use both public and private clouds in parallel. The two services at the core of new offering from Google are the →