DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show DatacenterDynamics

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.

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.

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. 

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. That's why we heard of the "cloud diaspora" - organizations people bringing their IT back from the cloud.

But what people need, Cantrill says, is an elastic infrastructure for the on-premise facility. In this podcast, you can hear him explaining why his team found they had to rebuild almost everything to deliver it.

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 their capacity. 

Seagate is the first to bring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to the market, so we invited chief commercial officer B S Teh to tell us why it is such a big deal, why it's taken so long - and how it could change what you do in your data center. 

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.