Market View 01

Ash Patel

Chief Technology & Innovation Officer

Market View 01

Ash Patel

Chief Technology & Innovation Officer

We are currently engineering highly sustainable Infrastructure as a Service products, and this involves using traditional public cloud methodologies in a private cloud infrastructure, with a highly sustainable design.

How is your organisation balancing public and private cloud infrastructure, and what’s changing?

We are currently engineering highly sustainable Infrastructure as a Service products, and this involves using traditional public cloud methodologies in a private cloud infrastructure, with a highly sustainable design. Some of the technicalities of public cloud obviously don’t apply but the core methodology we’ve adopted is the same.

With this approach we are providing a balance between public and private cloud. Many organisations are settling for public cloud or avoiding cloud entirely because of regulatory, legal or commercial pressures. There isn’t great awareness of the alternatives, and the perception is often that public cloud is too risky but private cloud is too expensive. Additionally, companies worry that the amounts of CO2 generated by cloud platforms mean it isn’t in line with their sustainability goals.

How important is the issue of sustainability when building and adopting cloud services?

As we look to deliver high performance for future workloads sustainability will become increasingly important. Having a data centre that’s designed and built from the ground up to be sustainable is a huge factor when you want to run high-performance workloads.

That is more efficient than trying to run a high-performance workload in a traditional data centre and using retrofitting to try and boost sustainability. The potential risk is that you are trying to achieve something the data centre was never designed to do. You have the wrong plumbing, the wrong servers and you’ll end up using more energy, which defeats the purpose of running that workload.

Having a data centre that’s designed and built from the ground up to be sustainable is a huge factor when you want to run high-performance workloads.

Organisations are in a real quagmire because of the challenges around manufacturing and supply chain, which means that something as simple as a lack of cabling is preventing them from doing what they need to do. That’s a real issue when we look at the large public cloud hyper-scale providers.

What would your perfect enterprise cloud deployment look like?

At the moment we have one flavour of architecture that’s highly scaled, but if we had a blend of hardware profiles that would work better. Organisations are in a real quagmire because of the challenges around manufacturing and supply chain, which means that something as simple as a lack of cabling is preventing them from doing what they need to do. That’s a real issue when we look at the large public cloud hyper-scale providers.

Our ideal set up would be a blend of hardware profiles that married up using software and APIs to connect them at scale, so that all our clouds are connected. All of those connected data centres would be one singular entity, and all your systems would be running simultaneously across different hardware profiles while being managed through a single interface. This would also address the skills gap, because you need fewer skills if the technology does more of the thinking about those different profiles.

We’re a long way from that Nirvana, but it would start to solve a lot of challenges around scale and competitiveness. We can do pockets of that today, where we create systems that can facilitate communication between one cloud and another cloud. But on the whole, it’s not reality.

Escher Cloud is an engineering and technology company that provides Infrastructure as a Service powered by highly innovative, cost-effective, immersion cooled compute facilities.

By revolutionising the energy consumption of data processing EscherCloud creates climate positive results that benefit human life, the natural world and the digital economy.