D ATA C E N T R E S
The Nordic Club
Future Proofing Your Facility
By Keith Sullivan, Marketing Director EMEA, Corning Optical Communications
Introduction
Keith Sullivan
considers the best
approach to next
generation data
centres.
From Nasdaq to Facebook, over the
past few years IT giants have flocked
to join the Nordic club. And where
industry leaders go, the rest will follow.
The region is helped by low energy
costs and naturally low temperatures,
meaning that power and cooling costs
are minimal. The Nordic countries
have pioneered powering their facilities
primarily via sustainable sources such
as hydroelectricity, wind power and
geothermal, so their environmental
credentials are impeccable. Sounds
like a data centre operator’s dream.
Just recently, Lefdal Mine Datacenter
announced it’s begun building an
underground data centre spanning
75 chambers over six floors within a
Norwegian mountain, which may well
become the continent’s biggest facility.
Earlier this year, the world’s greenest
data centre was also being built in
Falun, Sweden, which pumps excess
heat straight to the local town where it
provides heating for homes - the first
scheme of its kind. Cool, right?
Green Mountain
At Corning, we helped a data centre
to future proof its facility in the heart
of the Nordics. Green Mountain now
boasts low-energy consumption, high
performance and green credentials. The
facility is actually based on a remote
Norwegian island – the ultimate location
for a data centre that uses renewable
hydroelectric power and cooling from
the adjacent fjord. It’s PUE of less than
1.2 is world beating. Our project with
The rest of Europe already risks lagging behind the Nordics.
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NETCOMMS europe Volume V Issue 5 2015
Green Mountain began when they
selected Corning’s Pretium EDGE
solution for their newest, state-ofthe-art data hall, primarily due to its
flexible capacity and scalability up to
thousands of ports. The deployment
of a fibre-rich cabling infrastructure is
perfectly adapted to the facility’s energy
efficiency goals. Firstly, the lower power
consumption of optical transceivers and
the fewer number of switches required
in an optical system results in substantial
energy savings over a copper equivalent.
Secondly, the high fibre counts and
low profile of optical cable provide
as much as 30 per cent reduction in
physical cable and rack space, keeping
void space clear of congestion, cooling
pathways clear and so enhancing
natural cooling.
Green Mountain chose to standardise
on the best available multi-mode fibre
cable, using ClearCurve
bend-insensitive OM4 fibre. Bend
insensitive fibre allows providers to
sustain high levels of service, even as
moves, adds and changes inevitably
increase. Over time, as higherperformance servers and storage
replace those in situ, ClearCurve
OM4 and EDGE deliver sustainable
increases in networking speeds over
the life of the data centre. Already,
speeds of 100 Gbit/s can be supported
on cable distances in excess of 150m.
Performance Increases
While we can’t all build data centres
under Scandanavian mountains or
replicate the low natural temperatures
of the region, the technology being
pioneered in the Nordics offers a great
way to learn for other providers. It’s
crucial that data centre operators look
to the future and plan for increasing
demands – not just preoccupy
themselves with the challenges and
demands of the present. High-density,
fibre-rich cabling solutions, of which
EDGE is the ultimate example, will
always maximise energy efficiency
and pay dividends in predictable
service levels. In terms of sustaining
performance increases, there are some
changes afoot that a smart investor
needs to be aware of. In the cabling
sector, there’s a new kid on the block:
we’re starting to see the emergence
of Base-8 switches and transceivers.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term,
it means networking equipment that
combines optical transmits and receives
in groups of eight. Transmission speeds
in data centres are migrating from a
traditional duplex 10G to a Base-8
40G and 100G and now there are
developments happening for a Base-8
400G. After a transitional period the
industry has standardised on achieving
those speeds using optical fibre
organised in parallel streams of data: 4 x
10G in the case of 40g and 4 x 25G for
100G. Because we’ve got to receive and
transmit, that means 8 fibres per link
in total, which leads to a Base-8 fibre
system. In Base-8, we still use an MTPstyle connector, but terminating 8 fibres.
Trunk cables come in 8, 16, 24 32, 48,
72 and 96 fibrecounts.
When talking with major transceiver,
switch, ser ٕȁ