oles@ovh.net
09-16-2008, 08:56 AM
Hello,
For almost 2 years, we have established a limit of 2 new servers per calendar month per customer with the monthly payment. This limit was put in place following the many orders of certain customers youtube-like (end 2006), ordering 30, 40 or 80 servers at once, emptied the stock of servers available in 1 hour, who then did not renew after 1 month, and going on to take 30, 40 or 80 servers the following month.
With the start of the new datacentre Roubaix 2, then specially 2 years after the experience of the "reloaded" and "revolution" ranges of 2008, we have removed this limit. Indeed, now we deliver a new server every 9 minutes 27 sec (an average over a full month, nights and weekends included (!!)). We also managed to deliver (in June) a server every 6 minutes 23 sec. on average, but this is the current limit. We have technologies that allow us to deliver a server every 6 minutes 23 but not faster.
Thanks to the 3rd generation of "Ecological Datacentre with GreenCooling" (which we are currently testing), we will be able to deliver a server every 3 minutes. We still need about 6 to 9 months of tests in order to develop the technology.
Until the 3rd generation, we continue with 2nd generation datacentres (developed between 2004/2008). The new datacentre Roubaix 2 is a datacentre twice as economic as a traditional datacentre for one simple simple reason: we don't use air conditioning to cool rooms any more. The servers are cooled via GreenCooling: water cooling developed in 2004 and now operating with 40,000 servers!. The cold liquid comes into the server and captures the heat generated by the processor, chipset, RAM and hard drive. Thanks to the internal circuits km of the datacentre, this heat is evacuated outside the server, the rack and datacentre with 20 times less energy than air conditioning! You should know that the electric power needed to operate the air conditioning represents 50% of the energy consumed by the datacentre. No air conditioning therefore means the power consumption is reduced by 50%. Our datacentre Roubaix 2 (and 1 / 3 of Roubaix 1) consumes only the energy required to run the server, not the air conditioning. And as Intel / AMD have made tremendous progress on the ratio of "computing power / Wattage consumed," the new generation servers are extremely more economic in power consumption. By the way, when we built Roubaix 1, we had planned 8MVA of electrical power and our current consumption is only 4MVA with the full datacentre! These are real examples of economies of scale that benefits our planet. We think indeed,
that work on sources of alternative energy (which cost less CO2) is very well but the problem remains unsolved. When you think power consumption, think global warming because you must leave this heat somewhere . If we use energy, we warm the planet. If we consume less energy, we warm less the planet. And this is even better.
Our servers are cheaper than those of our competitors for 2 reasons:
- Because they consume half as much energy (than a server hosted in a traditional datacentre)
- Because Ovh passes a lighter energy bill to its clients (instead of making more profit)
To enjoy the maximum of technologies to customers that preserve our planet is far more interesting than to earn as much money as possible. This is what Ovh's management believe.
Regards,
Octave
For almost 2 years, we have established a limit of 2 new servers per calendar month per customer with the monthly payment. This limit was put in place following the many orders of certain customers youtube-like (end 2006), ordering 30, 40 or 80 servers at once, emptied the stock of servers available in 1 hour, who then did not renew after 1 month, and going on to take 30, 40 or 80 servers the following month.
With the start of the new datacentre Roubaix 2, then specially 2 years after the experience of the "reloaded" and "revolution" ranges of 2008, we have removed this limit. Indeed, now we deliver a new server every 9 minutes 27 sec (an average over a full month, nights and weekends included (!!)). We also managed to deliver (in June) a server every 6 minutes 23 sec. on average, but this is the current limit. We have technologies that allow us to deliver a server every 6 minutes 23 but not faster.
Thanks to the 3rd generation of "Ecological Datacentre with GreenCooling" (which we are currently testing), we will be able to deliver a server every 3 minutes. We still need about 6 to 9 months of tests in order to develop the technology.
Until the 3rd generation, we continue with 2nd generation datacentres (developed between 2004/2008). The new datacentre Roubaix 2 is a datacentre twice as economic as a traditional datacentre for one simple simple reason: we don't use air conditioning to cool rooms any more. The servers are cooled via GreenCooling: water cooling developed in 2004 and now operating with 40,000 servers!. The cold liquid comes into the server and captures the heat generated by the processor, chipset, RAM and hard drive. Thanks to the internal circuits km of the datacentre, this heat is evacuated outside the server, the rack and datacentre with 20 times less energy than air conditioning! You should know that the electric power needed to operate the air conditioning represents 50% of the energy consumed by the datacentre. No air conditioning therefore means the power consumption is reduced by 50%. Our datacentre Roubaix 2 (and 1 / 3 of Roubaix 1) consumes only the energy required to run the server, not the air conditioning. And as Intel / AMD have made tremendous progress on the ratio of "computing power / Wattage consumed," the new generation servers are extremely more economic in power consumption. By the way, when we built Roubaix 1, we had planned 8MVA of electrical power and our current consumption is only 4MVA with the full datacentre! These are real examples of economies of scale that benefits our planet. We think indeed,
that work on sources of alternative energy (which cost less CO2) is very well but the problem remains unsolved. When you think power consumption, think global warming because you must leave this heat somewhere . If we use energy, we warm the planet. If we consume less energy, we warm less the planet. And this is even better.
Our servers are cheaper than those of our competitors for 2 reasons:
- Because they consume half as much energy (than a server hosted in a traditional datacentre)
- Because Ovh passes a lighter energy bill to its clients (instead of making more profit)
To enjoy the maximum of technologies to customers that preserve our planet is far more interesting than to earn as much money as possible. This is what Ovh's management believe.
Regards,
Octave